


aut viam inveniam aut faciam

by keepitmythy



Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Films)
Genre: AU starting w/Homecoming, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergance, Canon Typical Violence, Canon is a fun suggestion, Gen, Good Guy Quentin Beck, NOT spiderio/starker, Sorcerer!Mysterio, Tags Contain Spoilers, Tags May Change, To write another Mysterio AU, Will go through Far From Home, Yes ok I’m taking a break from one Mysterio AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2020-10-29 11:57:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 40,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20796257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keepitmythy/pseuds/keepitmythy
Summary: It only takes one domino falling out of sequence to change the final design. Victoria knew Christine. Quentin meets Strange. And things end up a little different, this time.AKA, after being fired in Civil War, Quentin Beck finds himself on a different path.Eventual AU though Homecoming/Infinity War/Endgame/Far From Home. Not at all connected to my other ongoing Quentin Beck centered AU series.





	1. creo quia absurdum est

**Author's Note:**

> Important notes: 
> 
> A) yes I will be returning to Rise... soonish. I have that story plotted out but the motivation to write it has been lacking. It is not abandoned, just on hiatus. If I leave it for too long tho I will post a chapter that’s just basically a summary of the rest of the story, but I don’t super want to do that if I don’t have to.
> 
> B) some little timeline changes: Doctor Strange takes place before Civil War. There will also be a longer gap between Civil War and Homecoming.
> 
> C) title did get changed, was “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. Gonna try to update once a week, might fall short of that mark.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “_creo quia absurdum est_“  
I believe, because it is absurd. Sometimes, faith and desperation must trump logic.

Quentin Beck’s favorite movie for the past decade and a half (approximately) has been The Incredibles. The first time he sees it is in a darkened theatre a short walk away from his dorm, having been talked into taking the night off from his current project by his groupmates.

At the time, he idolizes Mister Incredible in the way only an idealistic nineteen-year-old can. “He just wants to do the right thing,” he says later that night, laying on his back on his friend’s bed, drunkenly staring up at the ceiling as he gestures with the hand not clutching a mostly empty can of cheap beer, “but all the rules and rega- rigu- stuff keep getting in the way.”

His friends agree: rules and regulations and _stuff_ are a pain, especially when applying for funding for projects half conceived but urgently important and impactful to their bright, teenaged minds.

“Fly home Buddy, I work alone,” quickly becomes the phrase said most often in Quentin’s research group when someone is getting hovery or micromanagey on someone else’s part of their project.

He’s so incredibly excited two summers later, twenty-one and beginning to plan his thesis, when he gets that internship at Stark Industries.

By the end of the summer, though, he definitely sympathizes more with Syndrome. Oh, maybe making giant robots to fight and kill superheroes because one was a little dismissive of you is going a little far, but he gets where the guy is coming from. Tony Stark is no Mister Incredible. He wanders into the holographic imaging lab once, disheveled and hung over and insisting, _insisting_, that the team make a holographic projection of himself by that night so he could go to a party instead of “some charity event for sick kids or something.”

Never mind, of course, that the holograms the department is developing are barely more than wire frames, are barely interactive at all, require almost a million dollars worth of sensors and projectors to exist at all and a computer with more processing power than a hundred home computers to render in real time.

It still hurts, though, when Tony fucking Stark looks at Quentin and says in response to his supervisor explaining that what Stark was asking for was impossible, “then why the hell did I hire you?”

And Quentin knows, he _knows_, it was a collective “you.” That doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel personal.

He finishes out the rest of his internship on edge, somehow expecting to get fired for the incident. He never does, though, and returns to MIT in the fall full of ideas for his thesis, unsure of whether he’d even apply for a position at Stark Industries. Did he really want to worry about working under Tony Stark’s shadow for five, ten, fifty years?

The decision is made for him when an offer letter appears in his mailbox that November. Turns out his supervisor had some hiring priviledges, and was impressed enough by his performance that summer to want him back, with a very generous salary, signing bonus, and stipend to help him move across the country at the conclusion of the academic year.

Quentin doesn’t even try to negotiate his salary, too afraid that the opportunity will disappear if he asks too many questions. He finished out the academic year, his thesis, graduates with honors, and is living in California less than a month later.

-

He finds out quickly that everyone has a Tony fucking Stark story at Stark Industries. He finds out through the grapevine and through practical experience that the man flirts as easily as breathing, often has impossible standards for his employees, and that any time he comes into the lab to be prepared for him to either fix the issue that’s been stumping him for three days or to give him a new one that’ll stump him for a week.

Quentin is so excited to be part of the team overseeing the installation of the newest version of the holographic projection system in Stark’s Malibu home he doesn’t really stop to think why the assignment went to him as the newest member of the Holographic Imaging team. The technology is a huge leap forward – the holograms used to need special gloves with motion-capture markings on them to be worn by the operator. Now, the cameras and sensors are advanced enough to track the movements of a person’s hand, filtering out involuntary or accidental movement and allowing for fine control over the 3D constructs.

The assignment quickly turns into a nightmare. Quentin spends most of the next week running damage control, running sims on his laptop every time Stark moves a sensor or projector on the blueprints to see if it will actually increase the coverage of the sensor/projector net or if Stark only trying to move it because otherwise he has to move his Picasso hanging on the wall by half an inch.

In the end, it’s about 50/50 helpful/harmful comments. The job that should have taken two days takes almost five, but it’s worth it when Quentin Beck, twenty-two, gets to stand in the middle of Tony Stark’s private lab, surrounded by a galaxy of holographic stars that swirl around him in a flurry of blue light as he clasps his hands together in overwhelming joy.

That picture sits on his desk until the day he’s fired, a candid shot taken by a member of the installation crew and emailed to him a few days later. For someone who, despite his dramatic tendencies, really didn’t like being in pictures, Quentin had to admit that it was a great shot.

Two months later Tony Stark goes missing in Afganistan and everything grinds to a halt.

“Can Stark Industries survive without a Stark at the helm?” the news asks.

Yes, obviously. It wasn’t like Stark had much to do with the day-to-day running of the company anyway, that was Stane and the board, for the most part.

“Where is Tony Stark?” the news asks.

Well, Quentin certainly doesn’t know, and although part of him hates himself for thinking it, it certainly has been much more peaceful, much less stressful to work in the holographic imaging lab without worrying if Tony Stark is going to barge in at any moment, unannounced, and mess with his work, or distract the lab for an hour or two or five by having them perform an impromptu demonstration of their current project.

Then he shows back up. Then comes the press conference.

Then comes the Great Reorganization, as it came to be called. For the first time, Stark actually seems to be paying attention to what is going on in his company, although Quentin has to laugh when he realizes what it was that finally caught his eye.

Of course Stark Industries was playing both sides of the war. They were a weapons manufacturer above everything else. Even if it wasn’t strictly legal of course their weapons were going to the enemy as well as their allies. Maybe he was just being cynical, but Quentin recognized that if both sides in a war don’t have the same caliber of sticks, eventually one side will win.

And peace is bad for business. Where the hell did Stark _think_ all of his company’s money came from, where all of _his_ money came from?

But luckily the Holographic Imaging department survives the Great Reorganization, and the second purge after Stane vanishes and anyone who had been reporting directly to him finds their keycards don’t work and a letter of dismissal in their inbox.

And then, of course, there’s the biggest bombshell of all: from the man who says his company isn’t making weapons anymore comes the news that _he_ is the most powerful weapon his company has ever produced.

-

The next time Quentin watches the Incredibles his assessment of Stark in relation to Mister Incredible, and his own fondness for Syndrome, grows.

Again, he reiterated to Victoria from Sensor Development over the water cooler one morning, he’s not condoning the giant robot killing people part of the plan. But you’ve got to understand the distaste for people who have been given everything and play her for the fame and glory when the opportunity to allow ordinary citizens to be special too exists.

Victoria just shrugs and admits that Violet was always her favorite character before going back to her lab and leaving Quentin alone in the hallway.

-

The next two years are busy. When Stark announces that he’s bringing back the Stark Expo, every department scrambles to submit proposals for a booth there. Quentin has become the second-in-command of the (admittedly small) Holographic Simulations department, no small feat for a twenty-five year old.

He suggests that they try for a photorealistic hologram with limited AI, and the proposal goes through. The team spends the next six months developing Holly, a holographic cat that, by the time of the expo, apart from being insubstantial and having a mild uncanny valley look to her (Quentin realizes a week before the expo it’s because they didn’t program her to have a shadow and works in a quick fix that isn’t perfect but helps) is almost indistinguishable from the stray (also named Holly) the team adopted to study.

And then he finds himself in New York City, basking in the admiration of the public as they use the laser pointer the team designed to be able to be tracked by the cameras to tease Holly, as they reach out to “pet” her only and smile as the image responds but nothing but photons slip through their fingers.

By the end of the first few days of the Expo Quentin is convinced that this is the best experience of his life. He’s gotten the hang of “holding” the cat, has even made a few modifications to its AI so when it’s idle, not interacting with gawkers, it “rests” curled up on his shoulders.

Then things go to shit. Quentin knows, he _knows_, as he listens to the news while he sets up the booth in a new configuration to test the AI’s ability to adapt to changes in its environment that the guy in France (Whiplash? Terrible name to be honest, although once he hears it he can’t think of anything better) is going to be trouble.

Somehow, though, a few days later as he runs for cover, desperately protecting the main drive that Holly runs off of with his body from drone fire at the Expo, it just doesn’t feel right to say “I told you so.”

Not that there’s anyone around to listen to him if he did.

Everyone who worked at the Expo is given a week off and access to trauma counseling. Quentin takes neither. After the Expo is officially shut down he takes the first plane he can get back to California, clutching the carry-on bag he’s packed Holly’s drive in to his chest until he’s asked, politely but firmly, to kindly stow his luggage under the seat in front of him, the plane is about to take off.

He does so, reluctantly.

The moment he gets back to the lab, however, Holly is back up and running again, never far from Quentin’s desk. The team learns to budget for that little bit of missing processing power when they run sims until they add a few extra servers to their bank.

They also learn to not talk about the Expo around Quentin.

They guy never seems scary. He’s a bit of a drama queen, sure, likes being the center of attention, usually all smiles and encouragement for his team, but it doesn’t take much to make a smile all teeth, to make it a threat when he tells the team to please, please not talk about the Expo in front of him.

-

The Holographic Simulations department, now headed by Quentin, moves to Stark Tower when he is twenty-six. He’s at the top of his game, working to make the projectors and sensor nets smaller, to shrink the amount of processing power needed to run a sim.

Holly is still his test case. He manages to get his office covered by only a handful of sensors and the same number of projectors, and run her off his work laptop even with her vastly expanded AI since she was created two years earlier.

He’s also gotten to the point that new hires to the tea don’t need to be quietly told to not bring up the Expo around Quentin Beck, unless they wanted to hear the coldest, calmest, lecture about how the Expo Incident was wholly Tony Stark’s fault, and how he deserved none of the praise he had gotten for cleaning up his own mess, and that Stark was incredibly selfish for keeping the technology of the Iron Man suit to himself and one other person when it had limitless applications and –

He would stop there, jaw clenched, and abruptly leave the room, return to his office, and stay there for at least half an hour before emerging again all smiles and refusing to acknowledge his tirade.

The only question he would ever answer about it was if he hated Stark, why didn’t he leave the company?

And he would answer with a friendly eye roll and shrug, “where else could I work with people like you, create things like this? I know how to keep my professional and private lives separate, thank you.”

-

Quentin Beck is currently having a panic attack in his office on the fifty-fourth floor of Stark Tower. Every time he thinks about getting out from under his desk, leaving the Tower to seek shelter somewhere that is not currently at the center of an alien invasion, the Tower shakes, the lights flicker, and he is reminded of exactly where he hasn’t acted on that impulse each of the half dozen times he’s considered it.

Honestly, he’s amazed that the power hasn’t gone out already. He knows that Stark Tower runs off of an arc reactor now, knows that that’s supposed to mean that even if the whole of New York City foes dark, supposedly Stark Tower would remain lit up, a “bright beacon of hope for all mankind.”

Yeah, Quentin had eyerolled his way through that company-wide email as much as everyone else but he had to admit that he was glad of it now, glad that his office hadn’t lost power, glad that Holly was still wandering around his office and investigating the various bits of ceiling tile and componants from the bins once stacked along his wall that were now messily strewn across the floor of his office.

Then everything stops. He risks a glance out the window to watch as the aliens plummet from the sky, then something else does too.

Quentin may not much like his boss but he’s certainly not heartless enough to wish death by fall damage on him, and he breaths a sigh of relief as the green monster – some part of his brain not screaming in senseless terror identifies it as the Hulk – grabs Stark, leaping down and out of Quentin’s field of view.

It’s then that he knows that this is going to be another Expo disaster – not only for him and his admittedly fragile mental state, but also for Stark. It would be another scenario where he comes out as the hero, another win to make Iron Man even more famous and popular and wrapped in wealth away from the consequences of his actions.

-

All projects in Stark Tower grind to a halt as it’s shut down for almost a month following the Battle of New York City. It’s a paid vacation, and a handsomely paid one as well.

The same offer of therapy for all employees who were caught in the Tower is made and Quentin attends one session before deciding never again. He has better things to do than ramble about why seeing the Iron Man suit makes him feel tremendously unsafe, why Stark’s very existance makes him angry…

The therapist suggests that he might have PTSD from the Expo, compounded by what he experienced during the Battle, and while the road to recovery was possible it would take time, and work, and –

Quentin doesn’t go back after that. He doesn’t want to think about all the ways that Stark has monumentally fucked up his life and the lives of thousands of others.

He takes the rest of his vacation camping in Maine, his distaste for The Great Outdoors outweighed by a desperate need to be somewhere untouched by Stark.

And it works, mostly. After three weeks of living in a rented camper, hiking and biking and seeing the glorious world of nature untouched by human (mostly Stark’s) hands, Quentin is the calmest and most centered he’s been in years. His department has been moved to another office building owned by Stark Industries a few blocks away from the Tower and honestly he’s relieved. Not only is the new location a little closer to his apartment, but the building (and his office, specifically) is completely out of view of the Tower.

“What if we focused on photorealistic environments?” he suggests the teams first day back in their new home. He pointedly doesn’t look outside at the still very active cleanup and reconstruction efforts going on, glad for the soundproofing in the building.

The team agrees, Quentin’s proposal is written, submitted, and accepted, and two weeks later Guterman joins them from game design, his experience in writing code for random events in the more open world or sandbox games his former department produced invaluable for the coming task.

What this meant was the next time Stark came to visit the Holographic Simulations department, instead of stepping into the suite of computers and cubicles and looking out to the individual offices against the far wall, he was standing in a vast, open field of wire-framed grass under a half-rendered sky, an incredibly photorealistic orange tabby cat chasing a low-poly butterfly a few feet ahead of him.

Stark steps forward into this CGI world and immediately barks his shin against a hidden rolling chair. His muttered exclamation of “shit!” is enough to get the attention of the team setting up the illusion in the room and it promptly dissolves into a shower of bright blue pixels around him. Curiously the cat remains, and Tony watches as it leaps up onto the bank of servers in the center of the room before leaping off the other side and onto the shoulder of the head of the department who stares at Tony with an expression he can’t quite discern the meaning of before it smooths out into a pleasant, business-like smile.

“Mister Stark,” Quentin greets him as the rest of the room looks on, nervous at what their boss would say to their – what was Stark, anymore? Pepper Potts was CEO now, had been for a bit. Did Stark even have an official position in the company anymore?

Regardless, the likelihood that he still held the power to see any of them promoted or fired was fairly high, so none of them were going to question it too much.

Tony looks around the room approvingly, noting the small, glittering lenses positioned on the walls and ceiling with mathematical precision to cover the entire lab in holograms. “I’m just doing a tour of the building,” he says, slowly walking in a circle around the central server bank, “seeing how everyone is settling in. Got anything else to show me?”

Quentin frowns for a moment before making a quick series of hand gestures, Stark raising an eyebrow as a holographic user interface pops up in front of Quentin, rendered in wireframe green. It’s not up for long enough for Tony to read all the options available that Quentin scrolls through before choosing one, tapping a few specifications before minimizing the UI to a small tab floating off to his side.

Suddenly the floor of the lab is covered up to Tony’s knees in water.

And honestly, he’s impressed. Every slight shift in weight sends ripples through the blue-green water that cascade out, ricocheting off the legs of the desks and chairs and server racks. He lifts one leg experimentally out of the holographic liquid and raises both eyebrows, impressed, as his pant leg and she appear to be wet, darkened in color and dripping water back down to its source.

Tony can see the tiny imprefections, where a holograms doesn’t quite perfectly meet the leg of a chair, or where the reflection of a lit-up computer screen isn’t quite where it should be on the water below, but on the whole hi is impressed – if he had walked into this rther than a half-rendered plain of grass he would have worried that the room had somehow flooded and no one had told him.

So he nods, first to Quentin and then to the rest of the team. “I have to admit, this is a little more impressive than whatever I walked in on. Beck, what is your team up to?”

Quentin flicks his fingers at the minimized UI, bringing it back to full size in front of himself. He focuses on it as he speaks, not looking at Tony.

“Guterman provided us with the code his former department uses to render semi-interactive landscape elements in games. We improved on them-” Tony catches Guterman’s friendly eye roll as Quentin flashes a smile towards him, “-eventually rebuilding the physics engine from the ground up to better react to unexpected stimuli without noticeable lag. We’ve preprogrammed it with several other liquids, from pudding,” Quentin’s smirk is directed towards Tony now as he taps another command into the UI and Tony lifts his food out of the now sticky, opaque pool, grimacing at the projected gunk still stuck to his shoe, “to lava. We can also simulate the properties of any liquid with known density and viscosity, although it won’t necessarily look like the liquid in question without detailed preparation.”

Another gesture or two from Quentin and the liquid returns to the murky blue-green from before, and (in a feat of showmanship that Tony has to appreciate) it drains down into the floor, leaving the previously “submerged” hardware and people’s legs dripping and damp looking for a few moments before all returns to normal.

“And the field,” Tony asks, giving the team more time to show off to him, “that certainly didn’t look as completed as this. What was your goal there?”

“Two things, actually,” Quentin responds, “We were testing the projectors’ ability to render landscapes beyond the limits of their environments. We want to see if we could someday create a, ah, a-”

Quentin coughs almost embarrassedly and Tony finished his thought, “a holodeck. I’ve seen Star Trek. Continue.”

“Right.” Quentin continues, breaking Stark’s gaze as he clears the UI from in front of him. “We were also testing Holly’s AI with holographic input. She runs on the same server as the main projection, so we weren’t sure if her program would even ‘see’ the projections, as it were. But, as you saw, she responds to the hologram as if it were real, and the hologram responds to her as if she were.”

Stark nods, cutting Quentin off before he can explain any further, “Keep up the good work. I’ll check in again soon,” and with that the man is gone, sweeping out of the lab with patented Tony Stark flair.

Quentin immediately drops down into the closest chair available, grabbing his now-tepid cup of coffee and taking several large gulps before getting back to his feet, gesturing widely to try to hide how badly he’s shaking.

“Alright, folks, you heard the man. Doug, boot the sim back up and let’s see if we can’t get to the low-poly stage of holodeck mode today.”

-

Quentin Beck is twenty-eight, and it is snowing in the Holographic Simulations lab. It’s been a relatively quiet year and a half since the Battle of New York City, and he is incredibly thankful for that.

The team is stress-testing the current iteration of the environmental simulation program, having it track the gradual accumulation of holographic snowfall on top of every available surface of the lab.

Except for keyboards. Quentin recognizes the need for some productivity, even at this time of year.

Come the middle of December and the lab is festive, snow still accumulating into drifts that someone has to ‘shovel’ into the hallway every day where it disappears into blue pixelated dust, but now accompanied by projected strings of twinkle lights hanging from the ceiling and along the walls. A menorah and a tiny Christmas tree sit on top of the server bank along the wall – both real, in a surprising departure from the rest of the décor – although the flames that had been lit on the menorah earlier in the month weren’t.

When Stark taunts a terrorist and subsequently goes missing after his California house gets blown up, Quentin finds it hard to be surprised. He’s even less surprised a few days later when the full story breaks a _of course_ it all goes back to Tony Stark being a dick to someone.

Rationally Quentin knows that it couldn’t all be blamed on Stark. Words like “unstable” are thrown around on the news a lot to describe Killian and something about that label rubs him the wrong way but he pushes it down with his undealtwith traumas and current misgivings about the direction that Stark Industries was going.

-

Quentin Beck is twenty-eight and it feels like the world is spiraling out of control.

‘We live in a world of gods and monsters,’ he had thought, once, after the Battle of New York City, and now he wonders if that thought was more than purely literal.

He thinks that obviously it is literal, at least to a certain extent, London is the proof of that. Hell, the Battle of New York City was proof of that.

But Quentin wonders if Stark might be less god and more monster. When the SHEILD files go public his team spends a week combing through the technical database leaked looking for inspiration – they find it in holotech to mimic appearances that goes a long way towards the full-scale projection of photorealistic humans – but that’s not all they find.

The Project Insight helicarriers are absolutely crammed full of Stark technology and Quentin has to wonder whether he missed a memo – when did Stark Industries get back into weapons development?

He gets his answer a little less than a week later when he sees a nervous looking William Ginter Riva in the cafeteria and he knows then that there would be no reason for Stark to hire the man that built Stane’s bastardized version of the Iron Man suit back unless he wanted him for something.

-

Six months later, the Holographic Simulations team has succeeded in creating holographic duplicates – as long as all you’re trying to do is exactly duplicate the movements of the original. Quentin stands, awkward and uncomfortable, in a grey and black patterned mocap suit, small sensor rig on his head to match his expressions, rolling his eyes as Guterman and Victoria (now a member of his team focusing on further miniaturizing the sensor net needed to project holograms) play dress-up with the holographic version of himself.

He draws the line when Victoria gives him a reindeer antlers headband and what is truly the ugliest sweater he has ever seen.

He walks through the illusion, swiping hi hand through the UI and crossing his arms over his chest, looking not so much mad as disappointed, eyebrows raised and a vague, wry smile on his face.

“You done?” he looks to Guterman, who raises his hands in mock surrender and returns to his work station, still working out some of the kinks with their current projected environment in progress. Then he looks at Victoria, who is smiling back at him.

“Honestly, I thought it looked good on you,” she says, shutting down the projections, “I could see you wearing it.”

Quentin wants to ask where the hell someone would find a sweater with that kind of neon green wool but instead says, “Where would I wear that? We have a dress code, you know.”

And Victoria actually looks uncomfortable for a moment before replying, “An ugly sweater party?”

“The way you say that sounds like you have somewhere in mind.”

“Ok, look, full disclosure,” Victoria says, “an old college friend of mine invited me to a party she’s throwing and told me to bring a friend. Plus, it would be a good chance to test out the overlay in an outside environment.”

“As friends,” Quentin clarifies. He likes Victoria, but not really like _that_.

“As friends,” she confirms. “I just thought, you don’t get out much, it would be a good chance to test the overlay-”

Quentin cuts her off by raising a hand, shaking his head slightly. “I’ll go. Send me the details.” He gestures towards his office, then to himself, still in the mocap suit. “And I’m going to go get changed out of this stupid costume.”

-

The overlay, as they called it, was another project the team was working on. They had already succeeded in making projectors for cell phones, able to make small, non-interactive holograms.

The overlay was a next stage of that, a thin, flexible, mesh-like shirt covered in sensors and projectors able to create a thin layer of holographic images that would move with the person.

Their end goal was to use it as camouflage for smaller applications than the massive retro-reflective panels employed on the helicarriers for now, however, this million-dollar tech was being used to project a simple powder-blue sweater over a turtleneck on Quentin Beck. He’d managed to talk Victoria out of the original monstrosity she had created, instead designing the projection so it would get more and more ridiculous as time went on.

Quentin realizes in the elevator in Victoria’s friend’s apartment building that he has no idea who he’s expected to know here. “So… your friend,” he prompts, looking over at Victoria who _is_ wearing the closest thing to the neon green monstrosity that she could find, “I don’t know her.”

Victoria pulls out her phone, swiping through images until she pulls one up of her, a year or two younger, and another woman. “Christine Palmer. I’ll introduce you, don’t worry,” she says, noting Quentin’s look of concentration, “And she’s going out with some high-level neurosurgeon guy – Stephen something. I don’t think they’re-”

The elevator dings and the doors open, cutting off whatever she was going to say. “After you,” Quentin gestures, following her to the door at the end of the hallway. He can hear muffled Christmas music coming from the other side, and reaches for the door knob, only pausing when Victoria places a hand on his, stopping him.

“One other thing,” she says, almost apologetically, “from what I’ve heard, Christine’s boyfriend is… a bit intense? So don’t take anything he says personally.”

Quentin? Take things personally? Never.

-

The overlay is a massive success. The rest of the party, not so much. Intense is one way to describe Stephen Strange. Egotistical and a bit of an asshole would probably be a better way of putting it. The tall, thin man looks absurd in a bright blue sweater covered in penguins engages in various winter activities, but he somehow manages to look like he’s in complete control of himself and his surroundings until he opens his mouth and Quentin hates him immediately.

A million dollars worth of time and equipment went into the overlay, it is not ‘cute’ is what Quentin wants to snap back at the man but Victoria gives him a Look from the buffet table and Quentin gives Strange a smile that’s really more of a grimace and goes over to her.

“You want to leave, don’t you,” she asks between bites of sugar cookie, “I know Stephen is a lot, but-”

Quentin crosses his arms over his chest, shaking his head. “I’m just not a fan.”

She shrugs, passing Quentin a cup of punch that he drains almost immediately. “I don’t think anyone is, really. No one is really sure just what Christine sees in him.”

But after that meeting the party goes surprisingly well. Quentin manages his alcohol intake such that he stays pleasantly tipsy the entire night while never quite crossing the line into drunk. And he’s always been pretty good at party games, between knowing lots of useless trivia and having better than average hand-eye coordination.

And then suddenly it’s two in the morning and they’re being ushered towards the door with an, “it was so great seeing you again, Victoria! Lovely to meet you, Quentin!” and they’re out in the cold, trying to flag down a cab to get them home.

Quentin would never admit it but it was one of the most fun nights he’s had in months, maybe even years.

-

Quentin Beck is twenty-nine years old and for the first time a proposal of his for a new project direction has been denied.

He doesn’t get it. His suggestions had merit – outfitting the newly dubbed ‘Iron Legion’ with overlays, sensor sets, and projectors had merit, had real uses. 

> Proposal One: Use overlays to camouflage drones on the ground to allow for more stealthy but still unmanned observation of targets.
> 
> Status: Denied. Mister Stark is not making stealth drones.

Quentin wants to reply to that with “well, maybe he should?” but doesn’t. 

> Proposal Two: Use overlays and adapt drone technology to mimic the powers of other Avengers. This could increase their appeal to the public by giving them familiar faces, rather than that of the robotic drones, and possibly cut down on civilian-inflicted damage.
> 
> Status: Denied. Mister Stark feels that this would cheapen the Avengers brand if the public is unsure of whether they are seeing their heroes or holographic duplicates.

That response actually pisses Quentin off. There are so many other opportunities there – allow trained, _human_ soldiers to pilot the drones rather than Stark’s terrifyingly omniscient AI, give the robots friendly faces instead of that same blank slate the drones from the Expo had –

He cuts off that line of thinking quickly, scrolling through the rest of the responses to his proposals. All their current projects are still being funded, that’s good, but… Ah, there’s a new one.

> Proposal Twenty-Seven: Begin preliminary research into using environmental simulation and brain-computer interface technology for therapeutic purposes, allowing the subject to relive traumatic experiences and change them, allowing for closure.
> 
> Status: Approved. Mister Stark is very interested in this application. Please keep him appraised of all developments.

The message is clear. Stark doesn’t want his Holographic Simulations department to have anything to do with the fact that he’s developing and building weapons again out of the public eye.

Honestly, though, Quentin is glad that those proposals never went through because he can’t imagine the kind of havoc that Ultron would have wrought if it had access to drones that could go invisible, or disguise themselves as civillians, or worse, as the Avengers themselves.

That being said, he’s not a fan of how quickly his ideas were dismissed out of hand. Projectors mounted on the drones could do so much more than what he had initially proposed – they could allow the drones to appear to rearrange the environment around a target and lead them astray, or make it seem like there were many more drones than there actually were, or even just disorient a target with confusing visuals.

Every proposal that Quentin writes on putting projectors on the drones is shut down and eventually he gives up. He hears the rumors through the grapevine anyway – the Iron Legion project is being shut down, although AI controlled drone research is still going on and Quentin isn’t so much angry as he is tired at this point, tired that Stark once again is seen as the hero after Sokovia even though he literally manufactured the crisis with Ultron.

-

Quentin Beck is thirty years old and he has literally never been happier than the day he puts on the headset they developed and is suddenly back at the Expo, standing in the booth and watching the Hammer drones fly by.

He pulls the headset off almost immediately – it’s heavy and bulky and not terribly ergonomic and they hadn’t gotten the feedback system to clear the traumatic associations with the memory away working yet, but for a first test he’s never been happier.

When Stark tells him to make sure it’s ready to go by the time he’s scheduled to present at MIT as an example of what Stark funding can accomplish, Quentin is a little cautious and unsure of what Stark means by that, but his excitement outweighs his initial doubts. Getting to be on the stage presenting to students that were just like him a decade ago is too great an opportunity to pass up.

-

They call it ATTHI: Accessing Trauma Through Holographic Imaging. By the time March rolls around they’ve gotten the headset down to a pair of sunglasses with metal contacts behind the ears.

In April Stark gives the team the specifications for the presentation and Quentin isn’t surprised that he wants it to be one of his memories, but at least Quentin is given a five minute slit before the demo to introduce the project, his team, everything.

His office walls are covered by index cards by the end of the month and Quentin is barely aware of the news, of the growing anti-heroic sentiments growing in the general population. When he first hears about the Sokovia Accords a few days before his trip to Boston, he’s kind of relieved. This is what he’s been saying for years: heroes need to be kept in check, and need to be answerable to someone beyond their own ideals of justice.

On a whim, he packs Holly, the laptop she runs off of, and a basic projector rig. He has no idea if he’ll have a chance to show her off, but the thought of leaving out the team’s first real, big holographic creation from showing their newest advance off to the world feels so wrong.

-

Everything goes wrong as soon as the team finishes setting up for the presentation. Quentin is dressed in what Victoria affectionately refers to as his ‘Steve Jobs’ outfit, black turtleneck, black jacket, the works, and has his headset on, although right now the only sound coming through the earpiece was some soft orchestral music to calm his nerves.

“Mister Beck?” Quentin vaguely recognizes the voice that cuts in over his music has the grad student assigned to assist them and Stark during their time at MIT, although he hadn’t seen her since she had introduced herself and then wandered off after Stark.

He taps the earpiece, a sinking feeling in his stomach as he wonders exactly what is going on. “Beck here,” he responds, glancing at his watch. Two hours until showtime, and he can already hear the slowly growing murmur of students lined up outside to get seats for the talk,

“Mister Stark wants to see you.”

Fuck. Ok, don’t panic, maybe this is a good thing? Quentin gives Victoria and Guterman a look from across the stage where they’re double checking the alignment of the large blocks serving as the bases for the parts of the set that need to be solid, and heads towards the small dressing room that Stark has commandeered.

He knocks on the doorframe out of habit more than anything else, the door is open already and Tony seems to be waiting for him, standing as Quentin enters.

“Close the door and take a seat, Beck,” Tony says, sighing slightly.

Quentin does so.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you,” Tony says, “They cut our presentation time.”

Quentin knows where this is going, but he has to try. “Do we need to cut down on the demo length?”

“No, no,” Tony replies, vaguely irritated hand gesture accompanying it, “We’re going to start with the demo, and I’ll introduce the tech along with the September Foundation. You just stay back stage and make sure there’s no technical difficulties. I know how stressed you’ve been about public speaking back at your old stomping grounds,” Tony flicks a finger towards the index cards poking out from the pocket in Quentin’s jacket, “So now you don’t have to worry about it.”

He turns away from Quentin, then, a clear dismissal. Quentin stumbles out of tphe room, watching the presentation in a daze until –

“Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing, or Barf,” Tony pauses until the laughter in the audience dies down, “Six hundred eleven million dollars for my little therapeutic experiment…”

“Barf?” Quentin mutters to himself. What the fuck kind of name is that? The rest of the presentation concludes and he’s left standing there just off stage, stock still, as Stark wanders off to god knows where and Quentin knows for sure that the dozen people who developed that tech aren’t even mentioned in the program that was handed out.

This wasn’t a last minute change, he slowly comes to realise, this was deliberate. Stark was claiming this technology as his own, setting himself up as the billionare genius everyone believes that he is.

Quentin is cold, is numb, doesn’t even know how to react when the credit for the application of his life’s work is ripped away from him. He knows it will go deeper – if Stark is claiming credit for ATTHI, he knows he’s claiming credit for everything else that Quentin has created over the years at Stark Industries too.

The first thing he does when he gets back to New York City is to pay cash for a laptop with the same operating specs as the one he runs Holly off of and duplicates her code, then spends the next two weeks until he is able to get an appointment with Stark salvaging broken sensors and projectors and building a small rig that could project Holly at home. He knows the likelihood of him coming out of this with his job intact is low but he’ll be damned if he leaves her behind.

His team knows something is up but no one says anything, just going about their business as Quentin shuts himself in his office, going though his projects to see what he had done that was completely novel and untouched by Stark.

The answer was not much, but he stored the data on a flash drive anyway, making several copies just in case.

Never let it be said that Quentin Beck isn’t prepared for any eventuality.

-

Quentin isn’t really aware that he’s punched Tony Stark in the face until his hand starts hurting and Stark is on the ground, looking at the blood on his hand in something like shock.

Let’s go back a moment or two.

Quentin goes to Stark Tower for his meeting and he is a jittery bundle of nerves hyped up on righteous anger, adrenaline, and a double shot of espresso from the coffee shop around the corner.

The elevator takes him to the top floor and he really isn’t prepared for Stark to look like shit, one eye still black and blue from whatever the fuck happened to him in Europe, but it doesn’t stop Quentin in the tracks of his indignation as he tosses the pamphlet onto the marble countertop.

“You never intended to let me speak, did you?” he says, voice remarkably steady, “I’m not even on the program. And Barf? The fuck was that?”

Tony doesn’t answer, instead pouring himself a glass of something amber and strong smelling, gesturing with an empty glass towards Quentin. “You want some?”

“Stark.”

“Alright, alright, calm down.” Tony shakes his head, walking around the counter to stand opposite from Quentin. “Come on, Beck. You know how it is, those kids didn’t want to hear from some,” he pauses, gesturing to Quentin, “some nameless Stark Industries employee, they wanted to hear from Stark himself. And the acronym, eh,” he shrugs, “workshoppable.”

“You claimed credit for it,” Quentin says quietly, not breaking eye contact. “Why?”

Tony shrugs, looking down for a moment at his glass before draining it. “Read your contract.”

“That doesn’t-”

“Anything you produce while employed here legally belongs to Stark Industries, not you,” Tony jabs a finger towards Quentin, “and since I own the company, I own it. Are you done?”

Tony turns away from Quentin and Quentin says the first thing that pops into his mind, very possibly the cruelest thing he’s ever said in his life, “Is that what you’re going to tell those kids?”

Tony stops, not yet turning back to face Quentin. “What?”

“Is that what you’re going to tell those kids,” Quentin repeats, “That because Stark Industries funded their research you own the results? And because you own the basis of what could become their life’s work, anything based off of it you own too?”

“Now hold on a second-” Tony turns back to Quentin but he’s on a roll now, he’s not stopping.

“And you lied to me and my team with such ease it makes me wonder what else you’ve stolen credit for, Stark? Did you even invent the Iron Man suit or was that some poor guy out in Afghanistan?” Quentin is yelling now, years of anger and frustration with Stark spilling out. “When was the last time you were involved in something that didn’t end in death? Iron Man, hero, your rebranding has worked pretty well, but I’ve been here for a while, Stark. I still see the Merchant of Death in front of me.”

Tony takes a step forward, hands outstretched, and then he’s on the ground and Quentin’s hand hurts and he knows he’s fucked up.

Like, badly.

He stands there, frozen, bloodied hand hanging at his side as Tony stands up, wiping his own blood off his face with the heel of his hand and points to the door. “Get out. Someone will drop off any personal effects from your office tomorrow. Leave your keycard and your employee ID with Monica at the front desk.

And Quentin books it. He doesn’t quite run but he definitely isn’t spending one moment longer in Stark’s domain. He’s stony faced as he drops off his keycard and ID to the woman at the front desk, as he walks back to his apartment building, as he trudges up the six flights of stairs because _of course_ today would be the day the elevator is broken, as he collapses onto his bed. He screams, inarticulately, into his pillow, the sound muffled, until his throat is sore and he’s lightheaded.

-

Quentin Beck is thirty years old and he’s pretty sure his life is ruined. His severance package is generous, surprisingly so, generous enough that he didn’t have to move but decides to anyway – cheaper rent is just one perk that comes with putting more distance between himself and Stark’s domain.

It’s been almost a month since he got fired. It’s the first time that he’s been unemployed since high school, and what’s more, he seems to be unemployable.

No one wants to hire someone who got fired from Stark Industries. He considers trying to make a start-up, maybe something like Holly, but remembers that he’d have to start completely from scratch, probably start from his undergrad thesis to be far enough from what’s owned by Stark to not be immediately sued.

He sends out a few half-hearted applications for graduate programs, research proposals, no one bites. It seems like the universe just loves reminding him just how much sway Stark has in the world and how little he has in comparison.

It doesn’t matter that his ideas are revolutionary, no one wants to listen to the ‘unstable’ engineer who punched Tony Stark and got fired for it.

This is why Quentin hasn’t left his new apartment for almost a week by the time Victoria comes to check on him.

He almost doesn’t let her in, but the prospect of human contact and what appears to be wine and Chinese take-out convinces him otherwise.

She sighs and frowns in disappointment when she sees him. Far from the days of perfectly clean cut Quentin Beck of old, he hasn’t changed out of pajama pants and a stained white t-shirt in days, hasn’t shaved in longer. His hair is an oily mess of bedhead and tangles and she grabs his hand as he reaches for a wine bottle.

“Take a shower, Quentin. Put on some clean – and I really do mean clean – clothes. Shave if you think you can manage it. I’ll open some windows and clear off and area for us to sit and eat and talk, ok?”

Quentin mumbles a vague noise of assent and while he still looks like a mess in a different pair of pajama pants and a clean t-shirt, still unshaven, hair wet but combed through, it’s… it’s better.

Victoria has stuffed a detritus of a month of takeout and microwaved food into two large trash bags and has even managed to find real plates and wine glasses from Quentin’s half-unpacked boxes.

They eat in silence until, “They shut down Holographic Simulations.”

Quentin looks at her, a lo mein noodle hanging out of his mouth before she continues, “Don’t worry, none of us are out of a job. Guterman’s back with game design, Sarah and Cass went with him. I’m doing some research now on controlled EM pulses, Doug and Rob went to smartphone development and Ellie – well, I heard that Ellie got a job at Oscorp, actually. So we’re all… we’re all fine.”

“I’m glad,” Quentin says quietly, taking a small sip of wine. And he is, genuinely, glad that his outburst didn’t fuck anyone else over.

They proceed in silence for another few minutes before Quentin has to ask. “Why are you here?”

“I wanted to see you,” Victoria responds like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“Uh-uh, no. Why are you here _now_.”

“I was hoping we could finish eating before-”

“_Victoria_.”

She sighs and pulls her phone out of her pocket, speaking as she scrolled through her pictures. “You remember Stephen Strange?”

It takes him a moment but Quentin does, ultimately, remember the asshole from the holiday party and nods.

“Well, he was in a bad car accident about a year ago. Spent all his money on experimental treatments to try to fix himself. Then he dropped off the map.”

Quentin raises an eyebrow, gesturing slightly for her to continue.

“About a week ago he shows back up. Look at this.” She shows him an image of someone who is unmistakably Strange, but wearing something out of a fantasy movie, floating a foot or two off the ground and with some sort of gleaming, golden energy surrounding his hands. Quentin’s head hits the table and he groans under his breath. Great, this is just what the world needs, another superhero with an ego the size of the country.

“The thing is,” Victoria continues, “Christina says he learned to do that. No crazy accidents or fancy technology. And you’re every bit as smart as he is. I bet you could learn too.”

Quentin picks his head up off the table just enough to give her a disbelieving look. “You want me to become a wizard?”

“I think they prefer the term Sorcerer, but why not?” Victoria looked around Quentin’s apartment with an appraising look, “what do you have to lose?”

-

They don’t discus it anymore that night, but Victoria smiles when she receives a text two days later. 

> _Beck:_
> 
> Let’s say I wanted to be a wizard. Where do I start?


	2. docendo discimus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “_docendo discimus_”  
We learn by teaching. See: rubber duck debugging.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for a good mental image of 30-year-old, recently fired and only recently stopped spiraling Quentin Beck, please see Mr. Gyllenhaal in Demolition (an excellent movie, though not one relevant to this plot other than saying ah, yes, this is what Quentin Beck looks like at this point in time). As for his sorcerer costume, kindly imagine more or less Strange, but no cape, and, like, green. You know the shades.

Stephen Strange has been Sorcerer Supreme for three weeks when Wong brings up splitting his time between the New York sanctum and Kamar-Taj, to oversee and assist in the training of the acolytes there.

He dismisses the idea almost immediately. He’s only just gotten used to the idea that barely a year ago he was a neurosurgeon with no idea that any of this existed, that six months ago he hadn’t even been able to make a portal, that three weeks ago he had wanted to leave this life, go back to New York City and try to find some normalcy in a life without magic, but with his hands back.

Now he can’t imagine doing any of that. He knows, deep down in his core, that this is what he was born to do, to fight the monsters in the shadows.

But teach? Most of even the lowest level acolytes in Kamar-Taj had been there before he arrived, and despite his self confidence he didn’t feel comfortable trying to set himself up as a mentor for people who had seen him struggle as he had his first days there. And that’s not even considering the fact that he was terrible at explaining things to people – things usually came so easily to him that the concept that someone might not understand something that seemed so obvious to him was hard to consider.

So he and Wong stay at an impasse as Strange works his way through the Ancient One’s private collection of books and begins figuring out just what is stored in the New York sanctum.

One month after Strange becomes Sorcerer Supreme, Wong drops an ancient tome on Strange’s desk. Strange sighs slightly, holding back a sneeze from the dust that puffs out from the book after it’s dropped.

“What is this?”

Wong runs a finger lightly over the Sanskrit title of the cover, “The Responsibility of the Sorcerer Supreme.”

“Wong-”

“Written by Agamotto himself,” Wong continues as if Strange hadn’t interrupted him, “It was written as a guide for when the title is passed down in times of uncertainty, or to one not fully trained for the role they have taken on.”

Ok, well, that was painfully honest and true. Strange closes the volume he had been reading on the transmutation of matter, slides it to the side, and pulls the other book towards him. He gently opens the cover and flips the brittle pages to the first section, taking in the handwritten words of the first Sorcerer Supreme.

Wong speaks as he does, gesturing slightly towards the book, “Apparently, it is traditional for a Sorcerer Supreme to take on an apprentice, one a stranger to the mystic arts, and by teaching them learn the limitations of his or her own knowledge.”

“So what, you want me to grab someone off the street and teach them how to be a wizard?” Wong doesn’t answer that, just gives Strange a disappointed look. “Ah, no, I’m supposed to let ‘destiny’ send me my ‘fated pupil.’ Come on, Wong, this is-”

The sound of the doorbell ringing cuts him off, and Strange stands, closing the book and jabbing a finger towards Wong. “If this is a pizza delivery person and you ordered it to try to make a point I will portal your ipod to the dark dimension, I swear.”

Strange sweeps out of the room, the Cloak of Levitation settling on his shoulders as he passes it, leaving behind Wong. He stands there for a moment, a small smile on his face: change is in the wind, and he’s fascinated to see what comes with it.

-

It takes Quentin almost a week after he got Strange’s new address from Victoria to work up the courage to go and speak to him. The situation still hadn’t lost its absurdity. Here he was, a disgraced ex-Stark Industries engineer, going to an ex-neurosurgeon to ask him to teach him to be a sorcerer.

Absurd. But here he was with a suitcase packed, standing outside 177A Sullivan street and looking up at the massive, fancy skylight and elegant façade of the building in front of him.

Ok, if there was somewhere in New York City that wizards lived, this place definitely had the right vibe. He slowly makes his way up to the door, anxiously running his hand through his hair as he stalls, unsure yet of whether he’s really going to go through with this.

He’s cleaned up a bit since Victoria had come to see him. His hair was short again, an inch or two long but still sticking up in a disheveled look he hadn’t quite managed to overcome, exacerbated by the state of his facial hair – past the point of stubble but not yet at the level of a proper beard. He’d shaved after Victoria suggested it, but didn’t like the way he looked clean shaven anymore and had decided to grow it back out. He likes the effect – it makes him look a little older, a little mature, and maybe a little less like he was always one bad day from just completely losing it.

The doorbell is right there and yet he hesitates, fingers stopping inches from the button.

What if this is a mistake? What if this is all some big joke that Victoria is pulling and he’s about to knock on the door of a very nice house and babble about sorcerers and magic and make himself look even more pathetic than he already does to complete strangers?

But it’s that last thought that gets him to move the last few inches and ring the bell. He has almost nothing left to lose now. His money is running out, he can’t find a job, and all he has left is his pride. And there’s plenty of that to survive the hit from this all being a big joke.

Why not hope your co-worker’s friend’s ex-boyfriend is a wizard and that he’s willing to teach you how to be one too?

He hears the ell inside the house, a surprisingly deep chime that he wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually a real bell, rather than the electronically produced chimes most doorbells used these days.

It takes longer than he was hoping for someone to come to the door and he shifts anxiously from foot to foot, nodding at the well-dressed passers-by as they look at him in confusion, a disheveled man with a suitcase waiting to be let into the weird house on the block.

Then the door opens and Quentin lets out a breath he hadn’t even noticed he was holding because there is Strange, wearing that ridiculous outfit that Quentin had seen in the photo Victoria had shown him.

Strange looks him up and down appraisingly and Quentin isn’t sure how to take the complete and utter lack of recognition on his face as he says, “Can I help you?”

Well, Quentin certainly hopes so. “I’m Quentin Beck,” he says, offering a hand that Strange ignores until he drops it. “May I come inside?”

There’s another long pause as Strange continues looking down at him. If Quentin remembers correctly the guy is an inch or two taller than him, max, but the step up into the building gives him enough elevation to tower over Quentin. But then he steps back, gesturing to the darkened interior and moves enough out of the way that Quentin could enter.

Quentin grabs his suitcase and steps inside, any doubts about whether this is a prank gone as he takes in the bookshelves, the odd artifacts in glass cases and hanging on the walls, the massive grand staircase in front of him leading who knows where…

He jumps slightly as Strange closes the door behind him, arms folded as he leans against the bannister of the staircase. “I take is this isn’t a purely social call, Mister… Beck, was it?”

“Quentin is fine,” he corrects, fidgeting with the handle of his suitcase. “I don’t know if you remember me-”

“I don’t.”

“-but we met at an ugly sweater party Christine threw a few years ago,” Quentin continues as if Strange hadn’t interrupted, “and…” he trails off. How do you phrase ‘and I got fired recently and a friend of Christine’s told me you became a wizard so teach me, please?’ without sounding desperate, pathetic, or insane?

“And?” Strange prompts, inscrutable expression on his face as he stares at Quentin. It’s like he’s looking through him, Quentin realizes, looking through to his soul and he knows that this man will know if he’s told anything other than the truth.

“I’ve been lost, lately,” Quentin begins, choosing his words carefully. “I lost my job, and with it everything that I’ve accomplished over the past decade. My friend heard about what happened to you, about how you lost your chance to continue your life’s work, and found a different path. So… I guess what I’m asking for is help finding that path as well.”

The silence stretches out for a long minute after that, Strange still just watching him until Quentin decides, ok, fine, never mind, and is about to turn and leave when Strange finally speaks, voice soft, still carefully watching Quentin. “And what path would that be?”

Does he really need him to spell it out for him? “Magic, Strange, I’m talking about magic. Teach me magic, teach me something that can’t be ripped away at the whim of a selfish billionaire!” He’s almost shouting by the time he finishes, hands gesturing wildly to their surroundings.

Strange nods, standing straight again from leaning against the post and circles around Quentin, who resists the urge to turn with him. “You want to learn magic,” Strange repeats, almost scoffing, “you lost your way and you decided magic as the way back.”

Quentin isn’t sure how to respond to that. He stands a little straighter, looks Strange in the eye when he stops circling, and nods. “Yes. That’s what I decided.”

There’s another pause and Strange narrows his eyes, considering something. Then, with a series of hand gestures faster than Quentin can really follow, the two of them aren’t standing in the foyer of the house anymore.

Quentin flails, almost losing his balance at the abrupt change in scenery until Strange grabs him by the front of his shirt, steadying him as they seemingly stand on nothingness, looking out into the infinite contradiction of light and void of deep space.

He looks out in wonder and awe – to think that he had once through that the holographic projections in Stark’s lab were beautiful when this existed.

And then Strange is speaking, looking out into space alongside him. “When I first came to Kamar-Taj, begging to be taught, my mentor didn’t tell me why sorcerers exist. I thought I was learning to fix my hands, not to be an interdimensional warrior, or to eventually wield an Infinity Stone. You need to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, or you’ll never reach your full potential.”

He keeps his grip on Quentin’s shirt and with another wave of his hand they were moving, hurtling through environments both familiar and fantastic.

“We exist,” Strange narrates, “as tiny parts of an infinite multiverse. Earth, especially recently, has become something of a hub for the otherworldly, the powerful, for artifacts not seen in proximity to each other for millennia.”

“An age of gods and monsters,” Quentin murmurs, eyes wide as he takes in the rapidly changing environment, and Strange nods.

“An infinite multiverse, therefore, is full of infinite threats. It is the duty of the sorcerers of this world to safeguard it from threats that would seek to bring an end to life and reality itself as we know it.” Suddenly they’re standing back in the foyer of the house and Strange lets go of Quentin’s shirt, who staggers back slightly, unsteady. “We don’t interfere in petty squabbles between men, we don’t seek to save _a_ life here or there. We safeguard existence itself. Do you still want to learn what I can teach you when it carries with it this burden?”

And Quentin Beck, mouth dry and eyes wide in astonishment at what he just saw can only nod and force out one word.

“Yes.”

-

Strange leads Quentin up the flight of stairs and down a hallway. “This area of the Sanctum is the living quarters,” he explains as he points to doors, “My room, Wong’s room, your room. Bathroom. Kitchen is own on the first floor.” He opens the door to the one that he called Quentin’s room, gesturing inside. It’s small, just a bed, desk, and wardrobe, a small window on the far side looking out onto the street. Quentin walks in, setting his suitcase at the foot of the bed even as Strange says, “You probably won’t need much of what you packed in there.”

“What, is there a dress code?” Quentin jokes as he opens the blinds, coughing slightly at the dust that falls off them like snow, smile falling as well as Strange raises an eyebrow, looks him up and down, then looks himself up and down at if to illustrate the differences in garb.

“I’ll have some vestments sent for you from Kamar-Taj, as well as some introductory reading. I’m assuming you don’t know Sanskrit?”

Quentin quickly shakes his head, maybe now wondering exactly what he’s gotten himself into.

“I figured as much,” Strange walks back towards the door and gestures to Quentin’s suitcase and the unmade bed. “Sheets and blankets are in a closet in the bathroom. Rest, unpack, get your mind in order. Tonight’s Thai night, any requests?”

Quentin shakes his head again, “I’m not picky,” and Strange leaves.

The first thing he does is text Victoria. Nothing fancy, just a ‘thank you,’ then begins exploring his new accommodations. The building is an odd mix of ancient and modern, the bedroom has the feel of a study in the house of an old-timey businessman with dark wood paneling and plush green carpeting that matches the hood on the antique reading lamp on the desk, all coexisting with modern outlets and an ethernet port on the wall.

Seeing that, he briefly considers setting up the laptop and projectors for Holly, but decides against it. Instead, he simply plugs in the laptop to let it charge, and leaves the rest of the hardware safely boxed up.

The bathroom is a similarly small room with a mixture of fixtures from different time periods. An old clawfoot tub sits in one corner next to a modern-looking glassed-in shower, modern toilet across from an almost out-of-place filigreed porcelain sink under a fancy antique mirror that reminds Quentin that even after a half-decent haircut and shave he still looks a mess, with an odd, haunted look to his eyes and dark circles that haven’t quite faded.

But he quickly finds what he’s looking for, sheets and pillow covers and blankets and towels all neatly arranged in the cupboard. It only takes him a few moments to put the sheets and blankets on the bed, pull out his own pillow he packed, hang the towel on the hook on the back of the door, and run back to the bathroom to grab a damp hand towel to wipe the dust from the flat surfaces in the room.

And then he waits. He lays down on the bed – which is surprisingly comfortable – and waits for it to be dinner time. He stares up at the ceiling and hopes that he made the right choice in getting himself involved in all of this.

Dinner arrives along with a large cardboard box and Quentin’s first encounter with Wong. There’s a glint of something like satisfaction in his eyes as Strange introduces them and he shakes Quentin’s hand, along with a threat against Quentin’s well-being if he damages the books he packed along with the clothing.

Maybe it’s Quentin’s lack of enthusiasm for the books that causes Wong’s expression to sour, but he drops the box in Quentin’s still outstretched arms with a little more force that necessary before pushing past him to the kitchen.

Quentin stands there for a moment, the small of food he was pretty sure wasn’t cheap takeout emanating from the kitchen before shaking his head to clear the cobwebs and carrying the heavy box upstairs.

He drops it unceremoniously on his bed, pulling open the flaps and frowning slightly at the stack of books, suddenly glad he brought some of his imaging equipment so he could digitize them. Picking up the top volume and thumbing through the pages of unfamiliar symbols, Quentin isn’t sure when the last tie he actually read a hard copy of a book was. High school? Maybe college? Probably college, he thinks, PDF’s of textbooks hadn’t started taking off until after his time.

Beneath the heavy, leather-bound tomes are notebooks – college rules, brightly colored, the type of thing you’d buy in a back to school sale for twenty-five cents a piece (and August is coming, Quentin recognizes that these very well might have been bought at a back to school sale). The bright, carboard-bound notebooks contrast sharply with the muted, ancient leather of the books, the contradiction between ancient and modern sharpened as he pulls out two small cardboard boxes of pens and pencils respectively.

And then there are the vestments. It takes him a few moments to sort through the clothes, separating out duplicates to see how many days of clothes he has before laundry. All in all, there’s about four complete outfits, although Quentin thinks that some pieces can probably be worn more than once before they’d need to be washed.

There’s an undershirt, so deep green it’s nearly black. Some sort of chest binding or wrapping that goes over that. Comfortable, practical black pants, sturdy boots, also black. There’s a lighter, hunter green piece somewhere between vest and sleeveless overcoat that ends around his knees and wraps strangely enough that it takes him an embarrassingly long amount of time to figure out how to wear it properly. Then, a belt (thick and also oddly complicated, how long is it supposed to take a sorcerer to get ready in the morning?) and gauntlet like wristbands that cover most of his lower arm and bind down the ends of this sleeves.

He feels ridiculous once he puts it all on. The fabric is still and thick in ways he’s unfamiliar with, and it takes some adjusting to get the vest parts to hand correctly below the belt.

Then he looks at himself in the mirror and barely recognizes himself. It doesn’t look like something out of a bad fantasy movie or a renaissance faire, which was what he was fearing. Instead, the shorter messy hair and subbly beard add to the look in his eyes of absolute determination and he’s vain enough to admit that the cut of the vestments is surprisingly flattering, and the deep greens compliment the bright blue of his eyes. He has to acknowledge the fact that he likes the way he looks in it, striking a pose like the picture of Strange that Victoria had sent him before dropping it after only a moment, laughing slightly to himself in embarrassment before heading downstairs.

The food is cold by the time he makes it down, and he walks into Strange and Wong having a hushed discussion over the table, abruptly cutting off as Quentin walks into the room. Wong stands, gives Strange a nod and an odd look, then walks out past Quentin. There’s the scent of ozone and the soft sound of sparks hitting the floor, and when Quentin looks back, Wong is gone, a single red-gold spark lazily floating through the air down to the floor the only evidence he left behind.

Right, wizards, Quentin thinks. They can probably teleport or something. He walks into the room, over to the counter, and begins heaping pad thai onto a plate left out for him when that statement really hits him.

Holy shit. He’s going to train to be a wizard like them. If they can teleport, that means he’ll be able to do that too, someday.

He sits across from Strange at the table, stretching his arms out in front of him, palms down, as he lightly taps the surface. “So, where do we begin?”

Strange arches an eyebrow. “Before you can even consider being able to channel dimensional energy and control it enough to do anything with it, you need the theoretical background to understand what you’re doing. Tell me, Quentin, when you began studying to become an engineer, would you have even understood what you were doing before you got fired?”

And Quentin has to admit that he would have only had the basest understanding of the concepts that went into producing and projecting a hologram on its basest level, not even considering one with any degree of interactability. He didn’t even get to touch a circuit board until his second semester, didn’t program anything more complex than a simple logic loop until the end of his sophomore year, and Strange nods, satisfied.

“Read the books that Wong gave you. This Sanctum is full of reference material on a wide variety of topics in the mystic arts. If you find one that interests you by all means, pursue a specialty. When you’ve finished the primers that you’ve been provided, however, we’ll begin your practical lessons.” And Strange stands, washes his dish, and places it carefully in a dish rack by the sink, before leaving Quentin alone with his thoughts and a lukewarm bowl of pad thai.

-

Quentin starts scanning the pages of the books he was given the next morning. It’s slow going, as the projection equipment he brought to run Holly off of is cobbled together from broken pieces, its resolution rudimentary at best, but once he has a decent start into the volumes he’s able to download a text-to-speech program onto his laptop and listen to the scanned-in pages while he works on adding to the database.

The Sanskrit books are more of a challenge than the primers written in English, and he has to almost entirely rework his image-to-text decoding software before it recognizes any of it, but he finds that the extra work in entering in the pages, as well as writing a translation software that won’t leave him with google translate level gibberish helps him begin to pick up the arcane script.

Strange is less than enthusiastic about Quentin’s use of technology in his pursuit of knowledge on the mystic arts, but after a brief admonishment that he had better not see scans of his books showing up on the internet he leaves Quentin alone to his form of information gathering.

It takes four days for Quentin to scan in the volumes Strange gave him, another two beyond that to get the Sanskrit translator working well enough to give him an overview of each page before he translates it by hand, updating the software as he does.

One week after Quentin arrived at the Sanctum, Strange decides that he’s given the younger man enough time to settle in and get acclimated, and that he’s learned enough theory to be ready to try his first practical lesson.

Quentin can barely sleep the night before. Even the normally calming drone of his text-to-speech program speaking about the Mirror Dimension in a perfectly monotone voice in the background can’t lull him into peaceful oblivion when his mind is humming with all the possibilities of what Strange might teach him.

Eventually, though, he nods off and his alarm clock wakes him what feels like ten minutes later. Lack of sleep can’t tamp down his excitement, though, and once he’s dressed and ready for the day he runs downstairs like he’s six years old again and it’s Christmas morning.

Only this time, the present would be actual magic, real, tangible, superpowers that he can learn with time and practice, and he has never been so excited in his life for anything – not when he got his MIT acceptance letter, not when he got his Stark Industries internship, not even when his Expo project proposal was accepted.

This was different, somehow. Quentin has never been a man given to flights of fancy – he had loved Harry Potter growing up like everyone else, but was already too old to hold out hope of a Hogwarts acceptance letter arriving by the time he read the series.

No, Quentin Beck was too practical a person to be given to flights of fancy as a child. Now, though, it wasn’t a dream or an impossible fantasy. Gods and monsters, superheroes and supervillains, they were all real. And now he’d have a chance to join their ranks by virtue of his intelligence and strength of will, not because of a freak accident or government experiment or by the circumstances of his birth.

And he likes that idea, that concept that he could earn a place amongst giants that no one can take away from him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not completely related to this work, but a general update on the projects I'm currently working on.
> 
> Projects in Progress:  
~ Rise of the Black Dahlia - on indefinite hiatus. The story is plotted and will get written, but other projects have consumed my motivation. I tried sitting down and forcing out another chapter and it was... it was bad. Like I said it is 100% plotted, I know where it’s going, it’ll just be a bit until it gets updated.  
~ Fictober 2019 - continuing to be written on a per day basis during October  
~ aut viam inveniam aut faciam - in progress, mostly plotted out, trying to update once per week. Might fall a little short of that goal due to the way it’s getting written (longhand, in a notebook during my lunch breaks at work, then transcribed once a chapter is done).
> 
> Upcoming Works (in progress, unposted):  
~ Detritus of a Life Well Lived - plotted, mostly written, planning on posting for Tony’s death anniversary (Oct 17)  
~ Variations on a Theme - Series of AU oneshots (one per movie in the MCU) based on chord progressions. No set update schedule, first piece is planned and being written. Hoping to similarly be updated at least once a month once it starts being posted.  
  
Also, I have a tumblr that I actually use now? You can find me there as @keepitmythy as well


	3. salus populi suprema lex esto

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “_salus populi suprema lex esto_”  
Let the good of the people be the supreme law. Strange sees this as humanity. Quentin sees the parts of the whole.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! It's getting posted a couple days early! Isn't that cool! Also it's longer than last chapter! Also cool!
> 
> Minor disclaimer: As you've probably noticed I'm playing a little fast and loose with time skips (~5 months after Civil War before the beginning of Homecoming). Also, as much as I love the Irondad aesthetic, you can't argue that it's not canon that Stark didn't basically ignore Peter for two months following Civil War and I'd bet that he would have kept doing that if not for the whole Vulture incident. Also, keep in mind you're seeing opinions of Stark filtered through Quentin's mind for the most part, so that's another layer of negativity to unpack.
> 
> But hey, Peter shows up for the first time in this chapter! Isn't that fun!

They sit crosslegged, Strange perfectly comfortable while Quentin shifts his weight every few moments, in a well appointed study just off of the main foyer. Leather and cloth-bound books line the walls, and Quentin can feel the weight of history in this room.

“Are you ready to begin,” Strange asks, hands trembling slightly as he lifts them to chest height, and Quentin nods, not trusting himself to not say something stupid and overeager and ruin the moment.

Strange flicks his wrist and realist shatters around the two of them, surroundings fracturing into broken glass before reorganizing into fractaled versions of themselves, and suddenly the walls are much further away than they were, and they’re sitting on a vast wooden floor.

“Magic,” Strange says, “Is not one thing. It is destruction and the force that binds the dimensions together simultaneously. It comes with the contradiction of surrender and strength of will, requires as much study and practice as it does instinct and natural talent. I have a good feeling about you, Quentin, but do not put too much stock in what you do or do not accomplish today. If you can conjure a single spark, I will consider that to be as great a feat as if you master all I have to show you today.”

He doesn’t mention how long it took him to get over his own mental blocks and accept that he doesn’t know everything, that he can never know everything, that the world is bigger and stranger than anything he could have ever imagines and that made it so much better.

“For now,” he concludes, “use the techniques discussed in the primers I had you read and follow my movements. You will likely develop your own style in time, but for now, stick to what has been proven to work.”

Quentin watches as Strange brings his hands together in front of him, then draws them back apart slowly, a thin line of red-gold fire burning in the air between them, before twisting it – one arm up, the other down, as the edges of the line trace a circle in the air. Strange allows it to float between the two of them for a moment before he snaps, and the circle and line dissolve into sparks.

Eagerly Quentin mirrors his movements, and… nothing. And even though he knows that he wasn’t supposed to be able to do what Strange showed him on his first try, it still feels like failure, somehow.

Disappointment must have been obvious on his face but Strange offers no encouragement and shows no disappointment of his own. He doesn’t even blink, just evenly meets Quentin’s gaze and says, “again.”

And again and again and again.

It’s on his seventeenth try that it comes, a faint insubstantial warmth at his fingertips that surprises Quentin enough that he loses it almost immediately, sparks winking back out into nothingness.

That’s when it hits him: this is real. It’s not a dream, or a hologram, or an elaborate hallucination brought on by stress and lack of sleep and Quentin feels like he’s going to start crying from relief and joy, hot tears pricking at the corner of his eyes as he lets out a soft exclamation somewhere between “wow” and something completely inarticulate. He clears his throat roughly, gesturing to the empty space between him and Strange and says, “did you see that?”

And Quentin would swear Strange smiles even as he says nothing but, “again.”

It takes another five tries before he can make a spark again, but by the time the light streaming through the windows brightens from watery morning sunlight to the full strength of the midday sun, there’s a circle floating in the air between Strange and Quentin again, this time held in place be the latter, a broad smile of astonishment on his face.

This is better than anything he could have imagined. The magic sparks at his fingertips, warm and inviting, and there’s that same kernel of warmth in his core radiating through his whole body in joy that this is _real_, he was doing this, and that this was only the beginning for him.

-

Time passes. Strange watches Quentin develop as a sorcerer like a time-delayed mirror of himself. The man learns quickly, approaches problems with a wry, sarcastic sense of humor, and has a gift for looking at the skills Strange teaches him from odd angles. Within three weeks he’s succeeded in producing shields and conjured weapons of high enough quality that Strange begins combat training with him, at which point it becomes obvious that Quentin’s creativity with his limited knowledge of combat spells makes him a surprisingly capable opponent.

Most sorcerers, Strange knows, will fight with a conjured shield and weapon. Quentin never seems comfortable with the traditional energy whip that Strange prefers, never masters it the way he picks up the other points of magical combat.

Instead, after tinkering and several volumes of theory on their conjuration later, Quentin seems to be on the road to specializing in the use of shields, able to use them like arcane boxing gloves as he comes at Strange one afternoon practice later, or throw them out into thin air like walls or stepping stones, or, in a move that he embarrassedly admits was inspired by Captain America, thrown like a frisbee at Strange.

And Strange has to admit, while his methods are unorthodox, they work. He even has Quentin show him how he managed to stabilize the shields so they stay solid in midair without dissolving if he conjured another, and Quentin happily shows him the volumes he read discussing how the spell can be altered.

It’s a whole new world for Quentin, having his boss appreciate the work he did without trying to claim it as his own or dismiss it as not worth his time, and he is _living_ for it.

-

One month after Quentin arrived at the Sanctum, Strange begins teaching him how to use a sling ring. He takes to it like a duck to water. After some initial issues, Quentin shows himself to be quite proficient in their use, and begins incorporating what he refers to as ‘portal hopping’ into his combat style.

And Strange is genuinely impressed. He still has the edge in experience and raw power, but he actually has to put some work into winning their sparring matches once Quentin starts trying to land on top of him from portals over his head, or throw a shield so it hits him in the back from an open portal behind him.

When he asks how Quentin came up with his combat styles the younger man has to laugh and admit that he’s an engineer with a decent grasp of inertia and momentum, and that he played a lot of Portal when he was younger.

He begins to mirror Strange even more one morning over breakfast after being told they would begin to move towards learning the more arcane uses of magic beyond combat and defense.

“You know,” Quentin says over a bowl of cornflakes, gesturing vaguely with his spoon, “When I asked you to teach me you made a big deal about the monsters of the multiverse, about sorcerers being proctors of said multiverse, etc etc and I’ve got to ask, where are they?”

“Where are who?” Strange asks, looking at him over the top of his newspaper.

“The monsters,” Quentin answers as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “And I was thinking, maybe if they’re not so…” he gestures vaguely, looking for the right word, “not so active right now, maybe we could look for monsters a little closer to home?”

Strange knows exactly where this is going and carefully folds his newspaper, placing it to the side, and steeples his fingers over his own empty cereal bowl. “We’ve been lucky. It’s been quiet lately.”

“Maybe on a multiversal scale, but what about here?” Quentin grabs Strange’s newspaper and slips through quickly to the crime section.

“We exist to safeguard life, not-”

“Yeah, yeah, life not lives, I remember the spiel.” Quentin points to several articles, “Look. Muggings, murder, mob activity on the rise. Spider-Man has the right idea,” he adds as he hands the paper back to Strange, “He’s helping the little guy instead of staying in his ivory tower until he shows up to fix a problem he caused and claims to be a hero because of it.”

“Is that why you wanted to learn magic? To be a hero? That kind of mindset will only hold you back from reaching your full potential.” Strange gathers his things and begins to stand before Quentin mutters something under his breath. “Care to repeat that?”

“With all due respect, Strange,” Quentin says in a tone that suggests that maybe the amount of respect that Strange was due isn’t all that much, “When I met you, you were one of the most self-absorbed people I had ever encountered.”

Strange’s eyes narrow, but he doesn’t say anything as Quentin continues, “To have these powers and not use them feels irresponsible, feels selfish. I’m not saying I want to go out and be some big hero, the next Iron Man, the next Captain America. But I do think that I – that we – could do a lot of good out there.”

Strange sighs. “You’re not seeing the bigger picture. Mundane crime will always happen. Dealing with that is the police’s job, not ours. If we tried to get involved in every petty squabble the work would never stop – where would you draw the line?”

Quentin doesn’t have a good answer for that, and after a pause, Strange seems satisfied and finishes dealing with his dishes. It’s only as he goes to leave the room that Quentin finally speaks. “Just because we don’t know where it ends doesn’t mean we shouldn’t begin,” he says quickly, “You said sorcerers are there to fight the monsters of the multiverse, right? Well, earth is part of the multiverse last time I checked. And some monsters… some monsters are all too human.”

Damnit. Strange sighs again at the doorway, not meeting Quentin’s eyes. “How would you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Let’s say you see a mugger. How do you stop them? Magic is dangerous against other, normal humans. What do you do if they pull a knife or a gun on you? Getting stabbed is no picnic, trust me. Then let’s say you subdue them without killing them, manage to bring them in to a police station. Then what? Do you stay long enough to give a statement? Do you testify at their trial?” Strange pinches the bridge of his nose and shakes his head slightly, “Quentin, there are real, practical reasons we don’t get involved in this sort of thing. And if you can’t abide by that ruling, I have nothing else to teach you. Take the day to think, Quentin. Stay or go, pick one. We’ll resume training tomorrow.”

And Strange leaves. Quentin balls his hands into fists, nails digging hard enough into his palm to leave white crescent indentations after he forces himself to relax enough to open his hands again.

Yes, those were valid points that Strange made, but they still rung hollow somehow. What was he supposed to do? He could stay and train, hope for a piece of the action someday against some future threat that Strange seemed so worried about.

But what about his peace of mind? What about that little voice in the back of his head every time he saw something on the news about a crime he could have stopped if he had been there to help? To have that kind of power and not use it to help people feels… irresponsible, somehow.

Then it clicks that that’s one of the things he hates about Stark and the Avengers as a whole. All that power, all that technology, and they hoard it for themselves, only using it to help people on a grand scale when it would make them look good. Stark’s arc reactors could have solved the world’s energy crisis a thousand times over and instead he uses them for his suits and one tower.

Strange’s words echo in his mind – stay or go, pick one, and suddenly Quentin can’t breathe. The dark wood walls are closing in, suddenly unfriendly, and he needs to Get Out, to be somewhere that Isn’t Here as soon as humanly possible.

In a daze he rushes up to his room, not even stopping to finish his breakfast or clean the dishes. He strips off his sorcerer’s vestments, frustratedly going through what normal clothing he brought with him and settles on innocuous looking khaki shorts, sneakers, and a light blue Hawaiian shirt that he was pretty sure Victoria had slipped in his suitcase as a joke at some point. He grabs his baseball hat and sunglasses as an afterthought when he catches a glimpse of the bright morning sun through the blinds on his window, and then he’s out, walking briskly but comfortable in the direction of Midtown. It’s then he realizes just how long it’s been since he’s been out of the Sanctum on his own – not since he arrived, he realizes, not without portalling directly to a secondary location.

And it’s _nice_. The congested streets and noise, skyscrapers towering overhead, it all feels tremendously _alive_ and _free_ after the darkened, hushed quarters of the New York City Sanctum for a month and a half. Even the sight of Stark Tower, rising over the skyline like a neon sign reading “traumas here!” can’t kill Quentin’s sudden good mood.

He wanders for most of the morning, enjoying his newfound freedom while he considers the question of whether he’d go back to the Sanctum or not that night. Around noon he finds muscle memory guiding him in the direction of a pizza place he had frequented while working at Stark Industries. He’s considering whether he actually wants to stop in, when –

“Quentin?”

He turns slightly to see the source of the voice as it calls again, “Quentin Beck?” Oh, there she is – Sharon, he remembers her name now, the normal weekday head waitress. She comes the rest of the way out of the door, leaning on the frame –

“We haven’t seen you around here in a while! You doing ok? I hope you’re not cheating on us with another pizzeria.” She’s all smiles, bright and cheerful in a genuinely friendly way, not the normal waitress fake-cheer he’s encountered at other places.

“No, uh…” Quentin pulls off his sunglasses as he steps into the shade of the overhang, “I just haven’t been in the area much lately.”

Sharon nods and he realizes that there’s no way that she doesn’t know that he got fired and is probably just being nice, but maybe he just needs that right now. “But I’m in the area now,” he continues, “maybe I’ll get a slice?”

She smiles back at him, moving out of the way so he can enter, and damn if it isn’t the best slice of pizza he’s had in months.

-

It’s two in the afternoon and Quentin still doesn’t have an answer to his question of whether he should stay or go. Without really making a conscious decision he starts heading in the direction of Queens, some half-formed thought in the back of his head suggesting that that’s where Spider-Man seems to hang out, if he rand into the vigilante, maybe he could get some input on his issues.

I mean, the guy had to have come up with some answers to Strange’s armor piercing questions, at least.

But Spider-Man is nowhere to be seen. As night begins to fall, Quentin buys his dinner from a corner bodega advertising itself as ‘the best sandwiches in Queens’ and portals himself to the roof of the tallest building he can see from the alleyway he ducks into.

It’s probably around seven or seven thirty when the sandwich is gone and he’s sitting there, legs dangling, nothing better to do than contemplate his current situation. At some point he stands and begins pacing along the edge of the roof, idly wondering if he’d be fast enough to open a portal if he fell before he hit the ground.

He’s so lost in thought that he nearly does fall off the edge of the roof when a voice from behind him says, “hey man, maybe step away from the edge?” then grabs him as he nearly does fall.

And there’s Spider-Man, and Quentin his immediately struck by the knowledge that this is a _kid_. He barely comes up to his shoulder, and his voice is higher pitched than he was expecting. He stares, dumbfounded for a moment as the vigilante gently pulls him away from the edge of the roof, then take a few steps back, hands on his hips, trying to make himself look…

Quentin isn’t sure what Spider-Man’s goal is, but the pose makes him look even more like a child trying to be Spider-Man than an actual superpowered vigilante with the strength to lift a car.

Holy shit, Quentin realizes, this child can lift a car, and the pose becomes maybe a little less absurd.

He misses whatever the kid says next as he holds out a business card and Quentin takes it, quickly looking at the logo and the information – oh, there’s definitely been a mistake, here.

‘National Suicide Hotline,’ the card says, and the one thing Quentin is sure of in this moment is that he’s not suicidal. Thinking back, he thinks he might have been after losing his job and spiraling, but he’s found purpose again.

“I don’t need this,” he says, offering it back to Spider-Man, who shakes his head, mask eyes widening almost cartoonishly as he puts his hands up in refusal.

“I know asking for help is hard, but that line is totally anonymous and-”

It sounds like he’s reciting from a script and Quentin pinches the bridge of his nose, cutting the kid off with a wave of his other hand. “Really, I’m not suicidal. Give the card to someone who really needs it.”

Spider-Man takes the card back, carefully tucking it in his belt. “Uh, well, if you don’t mind me asking-”

“I kind of do.”

“-why were you walking along the edge of the roof?” He cranes his neck to look over the edge before back to Quentin, mask eyes narrowing. “It’s a long way down.”

Well, Quentin had been wanting to run his issue by the vigilante. Now’s his chance. “I was thinking.”

If the mask had eyebrows, Quentin imagines that they would be raised now as Spider-Man exaggeratedly tilts his head towards the edge of the roof. “About… jumping?”

Quentin can feel a headache coming on, even if technically he sort of had been thinking about jumping, just in more of a ‘would he be able to portal out in time’ kind of way. But he doesn’t need to tell the kid that. “No. Not about jumping.”

The kid holds up his hands defensively before hopping up on the air conditioning unit and crouching so his eyes are still a little below level with Quentin’s. “Do you want to talk about it? Ned- uh, a friend of mine says I’m a good listener.”

He does, actually, want to talk about it. Quentin uses the time it takes for him to walk across the roof and sit down on the air conditioning unit as well to consider how he wants to phrase his dilemma.

“I lost my job a couple months ago,” he begins, “And then found a new one a month later. My first job was one of the best I ever worked, but it got to the point where it was clear my boss didn’t appreciate the work I was doing, and when I confronted him about it, he fired me. My new job, it’s… it’s incredible too, in different ways, but I’m starting to run into similar issues. Our…” Quentin searches for the right word to add to the metaphor, “our product could do a lot of good on an individual level for a lot of people, but my boss is so worried about the big picture I think he’s forgetting that people make up the big picture.”

He sighs, pulling off his baseball cap and running his hand through his hair – it’s long enough now to stick up messily as he does so. “I could leave, try to help people on my own terms, but if I do I’m fucked. I’d have no place to go and the likelihood of getting another decent job is… low. But if I stay, and I don’t try to help people, I know that guilt is going to eat me up inside.”

Spider-Man adjusts his own position, smoothly moving from a crouch to sitting next to Quentin, legs kicking at the air conditioner slightly. He’s quiet for a moment, head still tilted, mask eyes narrowed in thought before he says, “Is there any way you can do both?”

“Both?”

“Sure, like a…” he pauses, then snaps a finger at Quentin before hopping back down to the surface of the roof. “Like a secret identity. Do your normal job during the day, then once work hours are over, try and help people with – what is it you do, anyway?”

Quentin has to think fast, trying to figure out how ‘I’m an ex-engineer who’s training to be a sorcerer’ translates to the metaphor before shrugging, “I’m an engineer,” he says, which is still technically true. They haven’t revoked his Professional Engineer’s license. Yet.

The mask eyes narrow again before Spider-Man shrugs again. “Look, uh, I’ve actually got to get going, but if you need to chat again, I usually swing past this building a few times whenever I go out on patrol. I’ll keep an eye out for you?”

Quentin shrugs. “Sounds nice.”

“Alright, I’ll, uh,” the vigilante moves over to the edge again, gauging the distance to the next building over, “I’ll see you around, then, I guess.”

“Ok.” Quentin waits until Spider-Man has swung well out of visual range, then, taking a deep breath to steady himself, opens a portal back to the Sanctum.

-

Strange is waiting for him, his armchair in his study turned to watch the foyer. As Quentin steps through the portal he snaps his book closed, standing to greet his pupil.

“You didn’t have to wait up for me,” Quentin says, barely giving Strange a second look before making to head up the grand staircase.

“Are you staying, or did you just return to pack your things?” Strange’s voice is quiet, flat. If Quentin didn’t know better, he might almost think that Strange was… worried? What did he have to be worried about?

So he sighs, stopping halfway up the staircase and turns back to Strange. “I’m staying,” Quentin says, the addition of ‘for now, until you find out what I’m planning and kick me out,’ left unsaid before he continues, “but I think the time out of the Sanctum was good. I’m going to keep taking walks, maybe go to a bar or something every once in a while. I need a life outside of,” he gestures to the interior of the Sanctum, “this.”

Strange nods, slowly. Maybe he bought it, maybe he didn’t, but he wasn’t going to call Quentin on his bullshit yet. “I’ll see you for training tomorrow, then.”

Quentin nods, slowly, and Strange turns away, withdrawing back to his chair. He doesn’t relax until Strange is out of view, then hurries back up to his room. He’s living on borrowed time, now, and he needs to be smart if he’s going to make the best of it.

-

Quentin quickly develops a routine. He trains with Strange in the morning, their discussions moving from using magic for combat and to the more esoteric uses of the mystic arts. It’s here that Quentin’s rapid progress hits a wall, the finer points of conjuration and divination magic eluding him beyond the basics.

At night, however, he leaves the Sanctum and begins work on building his heroic alter-ego. And, of course, planning for the inevitable day that Strange kicks him out. He had made a few investments years back while still at Stark Industries, and while he certainly wasn’t rich by any means he thinks he’ll have enough to get him through a couple months if Strange kicks him out.

He briefly considers buying a house somewhere not in the city – it’s not like commuting would be a problem for him, he could buy an incredible house somewhere in the middle of nowhere for dirt cheap and portal in whenever he needed to, but dismisses the idea as anything but a last resort. He didn’t grow up in the city, but he’s spent the last half a decade here and isn’t leaving unless he’s forced to.

Beyond that… he knows he has other expenses coming up. He needs armor of some sort – he’s not fighting crime in street clothes, come on, he has an image to build – and if he uses his sorcerer’s vestments the first time someone takes a picture of him the game would be up and he’d be out on the street.

The question of suits comes up on the fifth day Quentin and Spider-Man chat on the roof. The kid has pulled his mask up to his nose as he munches on a bag of chips Quentin brought to share, and if he needed any more proof of how young Spider-Man was, this was it. His jaw is smooth and unshadowed in the way that only a teenager can have, and that weird protective urge grips him again – he’s kind of accepted at this point that he’s trying to get into the hero business as much for himself and his peace of mind as he is so he doesn’t wake up one morning and see Spider-Man got himself killed on the morning news.

“How’d you get the new suit?” he asks between bites of chips, “I remember when you used to swing around in a sweatsuit.”

That gets a smile from the kid, who jumps off the air conditioning unit and pulls his mask down, spreading his arms to show off the material better. “I know, isn’t it great? Mister Stark gave it to me after Germany and – hey, uh, Mister-I-just-realized-I-don’t-know-your-name, what’s wrong?”

Quentin realizes he didn’t quite hide his look of disgust quite as well as he had through and that he never actually introduced himself to Spider-Man simultaneously. “Let’s just say I’m not Stark’s biggest fan,” he says diplomatically, before adding, “You can call me Q.”

He’s not sure why he gives Spider-Man a nickname in the moment. Later he convinces himself it’s because of the Stark connection – he doesn’t want this kid finding the Stark Industries file on Quentin Beck and deciding that Quentin is more trouble than he’s worth and never talking to him again. Plus, Q sounds like a cool nickname for someone’s secret identity, he thinks.

Or worse, it occurs to him, Stark finding out that they’ve been talking and telling the kid lies beyond whatever’s in his file and the same result occurring. Maybe that’s paranoid, but Quentin is nothing if not prepared to the worst.

But gratifyingly the kid doesn’t seem as phased by the name as he is by Quentin’s distaste for Stark, only commenting, “Q? Like the character from Star Trek?”

It takes Quentin a moment to remember the character that Spider-Man was referring to – his favorite Star Trek growing up had always been Deep Space Nine, but finally the character clocks and he laughs, shaking his head. “Much less powerful and chaotic, but sure, like Q from Star Trek.”

The kid seems satisfied by that answer before moving on to the topic Quentin doesn’t want to discuss. “So, uh, Mister Q-”

“Just Q, kid, I think the point of a nickname is that it’s less formal than your full one.”

“Uh, ok, Q… What do you have against Mister Stark? I mean, he’s Iron Man! He’s a hero! He saves people’s lives – he saved mine,” he adds, the last statement a little quicker than the rest.

Shit, Quentin thinks. Of course that motherfucker saved this kid’s life. He sighs, running a hand over his face to stall for time until he finally says, “I think a lot of people have an idealized version of Stark as this great man, great hero, but so many of the problems he’s ‘fixed’ over the years can be traced back to him as the root cause. I think it’s selfish what he does with his money and resources-”

“He’s saving people!” Spider-Man cuts him off, gesturing to the direction of Midtown and Stark Tower, “he gave me my suit after Germany!”

Quentin sighs again, shrugging. “And I’m sure that suit is great and all, but do you really need it? What does it have that your old one didn’t? Don’t answer that,” he adds, cutting off any attempt at an answer, “All I’m saying is that Stark plays favorites when what he does and what he makes could help so many people besides himself and his inner circle.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m part of his inner circle,” Spider-Man says quietly, almost frustratedly, and Quentin zeroes in on it immediately. “I haven’t seen him since he dropped me off at my apartment after Germany.”

Quentin does some quick mental math. Stark returned to New York a week and a half before he fired Quentin, who then spent almost two months feeling sorry for himself before Victoria told him about Strange. Then there was another week of stalling, a week of reading, and he’s been actively training for a little over a month, which means…

“Hold on. Stark recruited you to fight Captain America and his crew, gave you a new suit, dropped you off in New York with said suit – which I’m betting didn’t come with an instruction manual or anything – and then hasn’t seen or spoken to you in four months?” Quentin can’t quite find it in himself to be truly surprised, but he would have thought that a fellow superhero to Stark would be treated better than that. Then again, why would Stark break his pattern of using someone as long as they’re useful and then tossing them away when they’re not anymore?

“It’s not – it’s not like that!” Spider-Man argues, but Quentin can tell the words sounds as hollow to the kid as they do to him. “I talk to Happy all the time!”

“Who?”

“Mister Stark’s head of security.” Quentin vaguely remembers the guy, he had followed him out after the confrontation with Stark, “Well, I leave him messages, at least…”

Spider-Man trails off, sitting down on another mechanical box on the roof with an audible thump and pity stokes Quentin’s anger at Stark a little hotter. What kind of person gives a teenager a super suit, let them fight some of the most powerful people on the planet, then drops them off home with no instructions and lets them deal with the criminal scum of New York City on their own?

The kid stands again, placing his hands on his hips and looking out over the skyline in a pose that’s probably supposed to look heroic but doesn’t quite manage it as he says, “I just need to do something big! Deal with an Iron Man level threat!”

“Wait, kid, that’s-”

“That’ll prove I’m ready!” Spider-Man readjusts his mask properly over his face and all but skips over to the edge of the roof. “He’s just waiting for me to prove I’m ready, that he didn’t make the wrong choice in giving me the suit. I do something big, and he’ll have to listen to me, have to notice me, right? I gotta go, Mister – sorry, just Q. I gotta go!”

Wait, that’s not what he – and he’s gone. Quentin full on facepalms then, sighing as he buries his head in his hands and mutters, “yeah, see you tomorrow, kid.”

If you don’t get yourself killed doing something stupid first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And one more thing: last chapter had the fastest and most incredible response I've ever had for anything I've written so, uh, thanks for that :)


	4. alea iacta est

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "_alea iacta est_"  
The die is cast. As Caesar crossed the Rubicon, so does Quentin make his choice, and the dominos teeter on the edge, ready to fall into a new design.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Homecoming is in full swing and things really start to take a strong turn into AU territory from here on out. And it's a little bit of a longer chapter from last time, so enjoy!

Quentin is nervous, distractible, can’t focus at all to save his life the next day, so much so that Strange cuts training short at lunchtime and tells him to “go get your head on straight and figure out what’s keeping you from focusing before you end up casting an explosion spell rather than a tracker.”

He wanders out of the Sanctum in a daze, not even realizing he’s at Victoria’s apartment before he’s ringing the doorbell and he’s realizing wait, it’s noon, why the hell is she there?

(“It’s Saturday, Quentin,” she says with a concerned look, and he can only reply with a distracted, “oh, is it?”)

“Quentin, what’s wrong?” she says as he paces back and forth in front of her living room window, muttering under his breath and gesturing to himself occasionally. “Quentin, I’m worried about you, what’s going on? Are you ok?”

“The kid’s going to get himself killed, Tor, and it’s all my fault,” he finally says, stopping pacing long enough to direct his comment before going back to pacing. “I shouldn’t have said anything about Stark to him, now he’s gonna do something stupid and I don’t have any armor yet, so I’d be getting myself killed and-”

“Quentin, slow down. Breathe. Start again from the beginning. What kid?” Victoria settles into the corner of the couch, gesturing to the other chair in the room.

He doesn’t sit, but he does pause and starts over. He really does start at the beginning with his training with Strange –

(Victoria wants a demonstration, obviously, and they waste half an hour portalling things around her apartment before Quentin continues telling the story)

– to his argument with Strange, to meeting Spider-Man for the first time –

(“You met Spider-Man because he thought you were suicidal? Clearly I need to spend more time on rooves!” “Tor, please don’t do that.”)

– to their continued conversations, Quentin’s research into armor designs, and to his conversation the previous night, from which Victoria’s big takeaway seems to be, “Spider-Man calls you _Q_?” she says, laughing, “You could have given him literally any other totally fake name, but you went with Q?”

“Come on, Tor, I had to think fast,” Quentin protests, “And I don’t think that was the big takeaway from what I just told you, anyway.”

“No, no,” Victoria cuts him off before he continues, “I got it. Spider-Man is a kid with serious ‘well done son guy’ energy with Iron Man and is going to do something stupid and heroic to get his hero to notice him, and I right?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have put it in those words,” Quentin replies, pinching the bridge of his nose as he feels a stress headache coming on, “But basically yes. What am I going to do, Tor? If I fight crime in street clothes or in my vestments I will a) almost certainly die from a stab wound or a gun shot or just general beating, or b) Strange will find out what I’ve been up to almost immediately and kick me out. But if I don’t try and get involved and give the kid backup, he’s going to get himself killed while he’s searching for a, how did he put it…” he pauses, trying to remember the wording, “Iron Man level threat.”

“Jesus.” Victoria swears under her breath, shaking her head. “Even Iron Man can’t handle Iron Man level threats most of the time. Not on his own, not without a lot of people getting hurt.”

“Exactly!” Quentin is finally getting through to her, “He needs backup, but I need armor, and, like, a helmet or something so Strange doesn’t recognize me the first time someone takes a picture of me for Instagram or something.”

Victoria thinks for a moment. “I might have an answer to a couple of your issues. You remember Janice, from accounting?”

Vaguely. Quentin shrugs, “Sure, what about her?”

“Well, she got moved to property management a couple weeks back to help with some sort of Department of Damage Control inventory.” She pauses, waiting to see if Quentin gets what she’s hinting at before sighing again. “She found discrepancies almost immediately. Just based on sheer volume alone the vaults they keep that shit in should be long since full, but trucks just keep coming.”

“So, someone’s stealing Stark technology? So what? Honestly, good for them,” Quentin says with no real venom in his voice. “Most of the stuff the DDC ships off is just broken junk, right?”

“And that’s where you’re wrong, friend,” Victoria gives him a smile that’s all teeth, “sure, there’s plenty of battle debris there. But based on what Janice was telling me, that’s where all the Chitauri tech from the Battle of New York went, all the Hydra tech that the Avengers gathered, anything left over from the Ultron debacle… I’ve even heard rumors that Stark is using it as his own private storage locker for abandoned projects.”

Victoria trails off but Quentin isn’t listening anymore anyway. Someone stealing from Stark - that could be a solid threat to tip Spider-Man off with, but he was more interested in what he could build himself if he got his hands on some of that technology himself.

Chitauri armor was damn near impenetrable, he remembered the documentaries on their tech done after the battle. Combine that with their anti-grav tech, Hydra weapons as non-magical backup weapons… His engineer’s mind begins moving a mile a minute as he considers all the possibilities.

“Where are the warehouses, again?” he asks, and Victoria smiles again.

“Not that I’m condoning stealing,” Quentin raises an eyebrow and she gives him a wink, “But I believe they’re in Maryland. Don’t know how you’re going to get in, though.”

“I’d imagine the less you know the better,” he says, giving her a hug as they walk together towards the door. “I owe you one, Tor.”

“I think you owe me more than one.”

He considers it for a moment, finally shrugging. “Ok, fair enough.”

-

Maybe it’s putting the cart before the horse, but Quentin’s mind is buzzing with ideas for how he wants his armor to look. There are so many inspirations out there, so many directions he could take - he immediately rejects any similarities to the Iron Man armor - too sleek, too sci-di, and most importantly, too recognizable. He doesn’t want anything too form-fitting, either. He’s not going to be doing any crazy acrobatics like Spider-Man or Black Widow or Black Panther.

Thor, though, he thinks as he continues to scroll through images of the Avengers, that guy has the right idea. The armor, the cape… It’s all very classic. He sets up the same software he used to design the sweater from the Christmas party, tweaking and modifying the aesthetic as he makes his plans for the heist.

Some parts he knows he can get his hands on without needing to resort to theft. The armored undershirt he gets from a motorcycle supply shop, the fabric woven with Kevlar and reinforced at likely areas of impact. He decides against his original idea for bulky gauntlets, opting instead for a pair of thin, fingerless gloves that extend down to his elbow, also woven with Kevlar and metal fibers intended for factory work, although his thinks that their puncture and slash resistance combined with the pair of Chitauri metal bracers he designs will work just fine for his purposes.

The pants are basic, stiff heavy fabric meant for construction work, but would provide the protection he needs in combination with the heavy, knee-height leather boots he buys with the intention to reinforce the shins with Chitauri metal and put the antigrav generators in the heels.

The rest - the chest guard, bracers, and helmet - will all have to wait until after the heist. He has plants for if he can get everything he wants, backups if he can’t, and doesn’t want to commit to anything quite yet.

The hardest decisions comes down to aesthetics versus practicality. Despite Edna Mode’s voice yelling ‘no capes!’ in the back of his mind, once he adds a cape to the projection - a heavy, deep red wool piece that ends just past his ankles and contrasts with the dark green of the undershirt and gloves and the silver-gold color of the armor, he knows it’s staying. He rationalizes it by telling himself it’ll protect the delicate components he knows he’ll have the build into the back of the chest piece, but honestly? It really does just look cool.

Maybe it’s fate that Strange is focusing on teaching him tracking and locator spells that week. The spells are meant for finding people, not things, but in magic intent is often as important as actions. It takes Quentin a few tries to get the modified spell to work - the first time he loses concentration almost immediately as the world lights up around him with every piece of Stark technology that’s infiltrated daily life a beacon to his magically enhanced senses, but by the following Wednesday after he talked to Victoria, he knows exactly where the technology he needs is hidden in a warehouse in Maryland.

-

“I’m going to be out of town for a few days.” They’re sitting on the edge of what Quentin has come to think of as ‘their roof,’ legs dangling over the edge. There’s an empty pizza box behind them. Spider-Man had eaten most of it before noticing the logo -

(“Isn’t that in Midtown?” “I got it on my way here. Special treat.” “Wait, you don’t live in Queens?”)

\- and now it seemed the right time to tell the kid not to worry if he didn’t see Quentin for a few days.

“For what, a business trip or something?” Spider-Man asks, looking at Quentin curiously. 

“Or something,” Quentin shrugs before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a folded scrap of paper, handing it over to the kid. At his questioning look he explains, “My cell number. In case you still want to chat while I’m not here.”

He’s expecting Spider-Man to hand it back with an excuse, or to put it in a pocket out of politeness and then never bring it up again. What he’s not expecting is for him to immediately pull out a phone, quickly type in his password, and begin adding Quentin’s number to his contacts.

“Say cheese!” He flashes up his camera to eye level with Quentin, who has no time to do anything but smile bemusedly. It’s not a bad picture all things considered, the light from the street lamps below cast his face in shadow while reflecting off his eyes enough to give him a vaguely mysterious look.

And, perhaps more importantly, Quentin realizes that between his different hair style, the beard, and his generally more laid-back attitude evident in the smile on his face, he’s almost unrecognizable to the Quentin Beck who had worked at Stark Industries not so long ago.

“You know,” the kid says as he messes with the contact form, “exchanging contact information is supposed to be a big step in a friendship. I don’t feel like Q is going to cut it anymore.”

“I’ll give you mine if you give me yours,” Quentin quips faster than his brain can warn him ‘don’t push your luck, Quentin, the kid obviously values his secret identity, you don’t just ask a superhero for his name.

“Peter.”

“I’m sorry, what?” There was no hesitation there, the kid didn’t even pause before telling him his name. Had they really hit that point? He supposed it was nice the kid trusted him that much, but…

“Peter. My name is Peter.” So, he hadn’t misheard after all. Wow. “Now you.”

“Quentin.” He holds out his hand to the kid and they shake before Peter finishes entering in Quentin’s name, a final tap sending him a text containing nothing other than a smiley face and the Spider-Man mask emoji.

Quentin enters him into his contacts, no picture attached. He definitely wasn’t going to match his name to a picture of the kid in costume and asking him to take off the mask felt like it would be definitively stepping over the line that they’d been tiptoeing around all night so far.

“So, business trip, huh?” Peter says, putting his phone away, legs swinging as he absentmindedly kicked at the side of the building. “I guess you fixed your issue with your boss, then?”

“Not exactly.” Quentin rubs the back of his neck uncomfortably. He felt exactly zero guilt at planning to steal from Stark, it wasn’t like the guy was using anything that was in storage, but he certainly wasn’t going to tell Iron Man’s protégé that he was going to steal from him. “I’m looking into something for the, uh, nighttime job.”

“So, you decided to do that? That’s great, man!” Peter pats Quentin on the back encouragingly, grabbing him at the last minute after nearly knocking him off the roof. “I hope everything works out!”

No kidding. Quentin knows if things go south, he’s screwed – forget about only getting kicked out by Strange, he’d probably end up in some secret government prison for the rest of his life, but he has to try.

-

His conversation with Peter winds down quickly after that discussion, and he waits until the kid is well out of sight before focusing, reaching out with his sling ring, and stepping through to the site he had begun referring to in his mind as “the warehouse of wonders.”

And it really really was. Even though he knows he has a limited amount of time to spend here he takes a moment to simply stand where he arrived and look around at the massive facility, whitewashed walls and concrete floor and massive metal shipping containers stacked beyond his range of vision like where the Ark of the Covenant was stored in Indiana Jones.

Alright. Time to get to work. He has six hours until the facility would reopen in the morning. To a certain extent, he knows he’s going to have to get lucky to find what he needs, but there are some indications of where he should start looking. Since the DDC wasn’t created until after the battle of New York, the oldest containers should contain the Chitauri technology he was seeking, while the containers closer to the entrance should contain newer tech. 

As much as Quentin’s fingers are itching to investigate the newer containers, or even just start opening them at random, his shopping list comes first, and he all but runs to the far end of the building, beginning his systematic checking of each container.

And damn if there isn’t a lot of good stuff here. He finds his antigravity generators almost immediately, taking extra in case his intended design doesn’t work, and portals several large sheets of Chitauri plating he thinks came off one of the leviathans to the storage locker he had rented in anticipation of this trip. It’s surprisingly thin and light, which is a good sign, although he has no idea how he will be able to shape it into something usable. As an afterthought he takes several of the Chitauri weapons as well, thinking maybe like can cut like in this case.

Then comes the fun stuff. Although he’s tempted to take every holographic projector that he comes across he doesn’t, knowing that if anyone ever bothered to actually do a proper inventory of this place, they’d go after people in his old department first and he’s not about to do that to them.

So, he’s choosy about what he takes beyond the essentials. A pair of arc reactors are an obvious choice, since he’s still unsure of whether a Chitauri energy core is the best choice to power the suit, given their instability.

Then he sees it. It’s in a container full of prototypes of Avengers equipment dated to just before the Accords debacle and he wonders who it was meant for, this helmet. It’s similar in basic shape to an Iron Man helmet, though a little larger, smoother, metal collar extending along the jawline and just the back of the head, but rather than a flattened metal faceplate it has smooth, rounded and mirror-coated glass. Well, maybe not glass, per see, Quentin thinks as he gently taps a fingernail on the surface, admiring how solid it feels.

He roots around for a few minutes until he finds Stark’s noted that accompany it. Exosuit mask blah blah blah designed for head protection and short-term secondary air supply etc etc etc project status hardware complete, software package incomplete due to lack of suitable candidate.

Those last few words, handwritten on the notes section of the blueprint he’s looking at, are written more darkly than the rest of the note and Quentin wonders which of the rogue Avengers this beautiful piece of tech was meant for. He pulls his laptop and a small set of tools out of his bag and searches for a connection port to see exactly what was loaded on it.

Within fifteen minutes Quentin has disassembled the helmet enough to get at the connection port and, perhaps more importantly, has removed the hardwired-in tracker and put it back in the case he took the helmet from originally.

One hour, that’s all he’s giving himself here. One hour to see what this helmet can do before he has to get out of here.

The software package is basic, but it has nearly everything Quentin was hoping to find. Most importantly is the infrastructure for a flight control system. He wasn’t looking forward to having to figure out how to rig a control system for the antigrav generators, and although it looks like this software is designed to run off of the four-point repulsor system the Iron Man suit uses, it isn’t hard to see how it could be modified to make the armor Quentin has in mind work.

The hour runs out more quickly than he realizes, and he reassembles the helmet in a hurry, placing it back through a portal to his storage locker. He takes one last look around - this place is a treasure trove and leaving is the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, but the clock is fast approaching six AM and Quentin knows he needs to leave, now.

So, with one last muttered “I’ll be back,” he steps through his portal and collapses onto the cot he set up in his storage locker and promptly passes out, fully clothed, visions of his armor dancing through his dreams.

-

When he wakes up it’s pitch black and he’s lying awkwardly on an uncomfortable surface and it takes a few moments and a few summoned sparks of magic to light his surroundings before he remembers oh, obviously it should be pitch black, he’s in a storage locker the size of his college dorm room with no windows.

He slowly, awkwardly gets up, fumbling in his pocket for his phone as he stretches, wincing as joints audibly pop. It’s past noon already, he realizes, as he reaches for the pull string to turn on the overhead light. He winces and screws his eyes shut when the resulting light is almost blinding. Once he’s able to properly open his eyes, however, he looks around the small room with satisfaction. There’s the large workbench up against the garage-like roll-up door at the far end of the room, the desk already covered in the smaller pieces of tech he scavenged the night before. The large sheets of Chitauri metal lean against one wall next to a small cardboard box of books he ‘borrowed’ from Strange on the creation of artifacts of yore.

He’s not kidding himself in thinking he has any chance of making any actual artifacts while building his suit, but the undersuit pieces had responded well to the addition of minor protective enchantments and he hopes what he scavenged will respond in the same way, if not better.

The undersuit in question is on the mannequin on the other side of the room, nothing but pants, shirt, and gloves for now, but Quentin can see it all in his mind’s eye. It’s going to be beautiful.

-

Quentin’s phone battery runs out of power long before he does, cutting out abruptly in the middle of a particularly dramatic aria from a Wagner opera on his work playlist. It’s like he’s back at MIT, or in his lab at Stark Industries working up against a deadline, where sleepless nights and days without a moment’s peace were commonplace.

A strange manic energy overtakes him sometime around what he guesses is around two or three in the morning that night as he wanders out of the storage facility and to a 24-hour convenience store nearby, where he buys a case of energy drinks and a box of granola bars, then returns to work. He sprawls out on the ground, leaning against the wall as he checks the connections from the transmitters in the helmet to the receivers attached to the antigrav generators he’s installing in his boots, painstakingly following the directions written in Sanskrit in the third book he flipped through in as many hours to bond the generator housing to the leather of the boots on a molecular level.

And then he hears it. Or more precisely, he hears nothing. He chose the location of his Beck-cave (note to self, he thinks, come up with a better name) for its price (minimal) and its distance from real civilizations (maximum) in the middle of nowhere, Iowa.

Or was it Ohio? Or Idaho? He’s not sure. What he is sure of in this brief distracted moment is that the only sounds he can hear are the distracted tapping of his screwdriver on the pages of the ancient book he’s using and the faint humming of the light overhead, and that’s it.

It’s weird, and a little discomforting, and Quentin starts humming tunelessly to himself as he works to break the silence.

-

It’s almost three days later, exhausted and starving, that he stumbles through a portal into the Sanctum kitchen. The bones of the suit are finished, an armored chestplate, boots, and bracers like something a Roman centurion would wear – if he were a little more technologically adept – joining the undersuit on the mannequin in the locker.

There are still things to be done, he thinks, making a mental list as he rummages through the fridge before pulling out a foil package of leftover pizza and shoving half a slice in his mouth like a starving animal. He’ll need to pick up the cape from the tailor’s (passable mechanic he may be, seamstress he is not). He needs to smooth down the edges of the banded metal that make up the chest plate. And he needs to polish the whole thing.

And most importantly, he needs to paint the helmet something other than gunmetal grey that it is at the moment, which clashes horribly with the lighter silvery-gold of the Chitauri metal that makes up the rest of his armor.

There are still upgrades on the horizon he wants to install as well, like adding the sensors and projectors to add an overlay to the suit to allow for a certain level of stealth, maybe get some sort of heating and cooling system as an underlayer, but it was there. It was done enough that after a good night’s sleep and a couple days of testing the flight systems, Quentin thinks he’ll be ready to fight crime with it.

He stumbles upstairs and collapses face first into his bed, remembering at the last minute to plug his phone in to charge before passing the fuck out.

-

Peter is a prolific texter, Quentin learns as he checks his phone the next morning. Since the last time he checked his messages a little more than three days ago there are almost fifty texts, ranging from a picture taken from their roof the first night he was gone with the comment, “I tried talking to myself since you weren’t here, and I think it was the first time an intelligent conversation was had up here,” to a few sent more recently inquiring as to his whereabouts and whether he was actually alive or not.

He shoots back a quick message telling Peter that yes, he’s alive, but accidentally left his phone at home during his trip. It’s white lie but honestly, it’s more believable than ‘I went three days without sleeping while building a suit of armor from stolen technology and didn’t think to bring my phone charger.’

And for some reason he realizes he really does want to keep these parts of him separate. He wants to just be Quentin sometimes, just a normal dude who likes to sit on rooves and chat with Peter. But he also wants to be – he draws a blank for a moment, realizing that he hasn’t come up with a good superhero name yet – he wants to be another superhero who can fight crime alongside Spider-Man.

The shower is amazing after wearing the same clothes for three days, hot water washing away dirt and grime along with the aches and pains that come with not sleeping for three days and spending most of that hunched over a workbench. It feels strange to put on his sorcerer’s vestments again, the still fabric so different from the armor he built.

-

Strange is at the breakfast table already when Quentin makes it down. He doesn’t comment on the dark circles under Quentin’s eyes or the still somewhat stiff way he walks, only giving him a slight nod before returning to reading his morning paper. Good, Quentin thinks, he doesn’t know what I’m up to yet.

-

It takes three more nights of testing, tweaking, and painting before Quentin is ready to take the suit out for a spin in the city. Flying is one of the most incredible experiences he’s ever had, and after a few initial mishaps with the placement of the stabilizers and the control software in the helmet, it’s perfect.

He’s tempted to just cruise around the city forever, making hairpin turns to follow birds, ducking down around radio antennae and dodging helicopters, but as the sun begins to set and glints off the side of Stark Tower he reminds himself of why he’s doing this.

And for the first time he kind of gets why Stark made the Iron Man suit able to fly. It’s as close as anyone can get to being free of the restraints of gravity in this life.

He hovers over Times Square for a moment, high enough to be mistaken for a balloon or a drone by the people below before turning and heading for Queens. He has criminals to catch and a friendly neighborhood vigilante to catch up with.

-

An ATM robbery. That was all it was supposed to be, Peter thinks as he jumps out of the way of Iron Man mask, pulling his gun out of his hand with a perfectly placed web.

Guns he wasn’t scared of these days. He hasn’t gotten shot yet, his reflexes are good enough to get him out of harm’s way most of the time before the bad guy even had a chance to properly aim at him.

Ok, to be fair he had gotten shot once, grazed, really, the second time he went out as Spider-Man after Uncle Ben died when the sight of a pistol was enough to make him freeze, but that’s not the point.

The point is that the anti-grav gun the criminal wearing the Thor mask has pointed at hi is not something someone just looking to rob a bank should have. That’s like, that’s like Avengers level tech, Peter thinks to himself. And his sentiment is echoed by a voice behind him, its source just out of his range of vision caught as he was in the gun’s field.

“Gentlemen, as pleased as I am to see the Avengers taking an interest in life on the ground, I would have thought that an ATM robbery was a little beneath you?” The voice is dry, sarcastic, oddly familiar even filtered through some sort of speaker an enunciated like someone delivering a speech in a play, rather than a legitimate threat.

He steps forward around into Peter’s field of view and for a moment he thinks, Thor?, before realizing no, not Thor. The heavy woolen cape is a darker red, but seems to occasionally spark with golden light along the edges. There’s the boots, black leather with an odd bluish-purple glow near the heels, black pants, The newcomer stands with his thumbs in his pockets, fingers flat against his thighs as he looks down at peter from behind a mirrored glass and polished dark green metal helmet, the same shade as the undershirt he wears beneath bracers and a simple banded metal chestpiece that gives off a bluish glow from panels barely visible between the pieces of his chestguard as he moves.

He doesn’t do anything more for a moment and Peter is scared that he’s actually there to do crime as well (and he’s not super psyched about trying to fight off someone dressed like Thor and Vision and a little bit of Iron Man all rolled into one in addition to the three thugs already there). Then Hulk mast steps forward and Helmet sucker punches him in the gut before summoning a shield of glowing reddish-gold energy he uses to clock the guy across the face before letting the shield dissipate as Hulk mask slumps to the ground.

Helmet raises his hands placatingly to the other two criminals. “Put your weapons down, take your friend, and run along now, boys. I’m sure you want to avoid more injuries or, heaven forbid, jail time.”

Thor mask releases Peter from the anti-grav field and for a moment he hopes that Helmet has actually gotten through to the criminals before Thor fiddles with a setting on the gun, and a beam of bright blue-purple light blasts Helmet in the chest, sending him flying through the bank window, across the street, and through the front window of Delmar’s.

He doesn’t get up. The criminals start laughing, and peter takes the opportunity to pull the antigrav gun away from them and web them up a little tighter than is strictly necessary. He scales the building to leave the gun on the roof with a mental note to go back for it later before –

Helmet! He forgot about Helmet! He doubts the guy is dead, he’s seen people (well, super-people) take nastier shots than that and walk away, but he didn’t look so good after that. He scrambles across the street, even as he can hear sirens beginning to converge in the distance.

Delmar’s is in pretty good shape for just having someone thrown through the window. There’s broken glass everywhere, and Peter ducks down as he can hear Mister Delmar talking on the phone with someone from behind the counter, “si, el hombre misterioso escape por un portal…”

Peter stops listening as he translates in his head. The mysterious man escaped through a portal –

Helmet can open portals? That’s so cool! But at least that means he wasn’t so hurt that he couldn’t get away. Peter sneaks back outside, turning Mister Delmar’s words over in his head.

“El hombre misterioso…” Helmet needed a better name than Helmet, Peter thinks as he climbs the tall building next door, intending to stay there until the police left to make sure they took the criminals with them and no one made any daring escapes. Misterio? Nah, he’s a superhero. Mysterio? Much cooler.

Peter settles on the roof, intending to simply sit and wait, when he hears it – a low groan from behind the housing of the staircase door in the middle of the roof. He carefully creeps across the roof, peaking his head around the edge of the wall, moving a little faster when he sees a pair of black-booted feet sticking out, the helmet off and next to them.

And then he sees the rest. The singed cape, the dented armor, and…

“Hey, kid,” mutters Quentin, his mouth bloodstained as he manages to give Peter a fragile smile. “I think that went pretty well, what about you?”

And Peter can only watch in utter confusion and horror as the man’s eyes flutter closed and he tips over sideways, unconscious, onto the surface of the roof.


	5. quid est veritas?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "_quid est veritas?_"  
What is the truth? Honestly, that's all Peter really wants to know right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Little shorter than the last chapter. Mostly just one long scene with a lot of talking, but next chapter will have a little more action in it.

For a moment, Peter just stands there, processing what he’s seeing. That’s Quentin. That’s the guy he’s been chatting with on rooftops for two weeks, the third person other than Tony and Happy who knows his secret identity, the guy who just dropped off the face of the earth for almost a week…

He pulls off his mask before reaching out with a shaking hand to brush first against the chestplate - the metal is warm and he can feel a faint humming vibration beneath that spoke to some sort of technological explanation to Quentin’s newfound powers - before gently touching the side of his neck, feeling for a pulse.

Peter relaxes slightly when he feels one, strong and steady beneath his fingers, and continues his inspection of the man’s injuries. There’s no more blood leaking out of the man’s mouth, which is reassuring, and although his breathing is shallow Peter can’t hear anything that would spell major internal injuries - no grinding of bones on bones, no rushing air where it shouldn’t be, no struggling uneven heartbeat. He guesses that Quentin is probably going to be sore for a few days but doesn’t seem to have any major internal injuries.

He carefully pulls him back to a sitting position, gratified to see Quentin’s eyes flutter back open with a groan. Peter can tell now that the blood in his mouth looks like it was only from him biting his lip as he was thrown across the street, which is already swelling slightly.

The bigger problem is how much trouble the older man seems to be having focusing on Peter, eyes drifting off before snapping back to him, and Peter can smell blood on him beyond the bit lip. He carefully reaches around to touch the back of Quentin’s head, finding what he’s looking for almost immediately. A quick check of the inside of the discarded helmet confirms it - the interior is barely padded at all, and although it seems to have protected Quentin from having his skull split open when he fell through the window, he still took a hard enough impact to open a gash on the back of his head and probably get a -

“Pe’er? What’sssss… What’s goin’ on?” Quentin slurs, looking around aimlessly before settling back on Peter’s face. “Gosh you’re young,” he mutters to himself before leaning back against the wall, wincing as he closes his eyes again. “Why does my head hurt so much?”

Yeah, Peter thinks, that’s probably a concussion. Shit. He fumbles for his phone, getting as far as the dial screen before realizing he has no idea who he would even call. Quentin seems to have some issue with Stark, and even if Peter was willing to deal with all that he doesn’t know if Happy would pick up if he called.

Aunt May’s a nurse, but asking for her help with Quentin in this state would mean answering a lot of questions that he doesn’t want to be asked right now, unless… “Quentin?”

Quentin opens his eyes a little, still not quite focusing on him. “Hmm?”

“Do you have an apartment nearby? Somewhere safe, with a first aid kit so we can get that armor off of you and make sure you’re not going to die?” Quentin seems to lose focus again and Peter snaps his fingers a couple times in front of his nose before he blinks slowly.

“Safe… workshop. Hold on,” he mutters, and the world drops out from under Peter’s feet in a shower of reddish gold sparks.

-

Quentin’s head hurt. The rational side of him is screaming, “You idiot! You got a concussion on your first day out, what the fuck were you doing, why are you taking your helmet off now,” and other worrying comments like that, but the thoughts from the rational side of his brain are fading in and out like a radio signal at the edge of its broadcast range.

He knows he needs to get up, get out of his armor, probably seek help from an actual medical professional (although how he would explain the origin of his injuries is another issue entirely).

His mouth lakes like paperclips, metallic tang of blood joining the ozoney taste from being in close proximity to an arc reactor for an extended period of time that probably means that he didn’t properly ground a connection somewhere but that’s a problem for another day because as it is right now? It works.

If the world wasn’t spinning so alarmingly he is even fairly sure that he could fly out of here now. His chest is bruised but unbroken, the issue is more that he neglected to add the additional padding to the back of his helmet as he had planned - so when his helmet hit the window, his head hit the helmet.

And then there’s a red blob in his field of view and he’s just lucid enough to recognize Spider-Peter. Peter-Man. No, that’s not right, he’s a kid. His mouth moves and he says something he hopes is clever before he lets the darkness close in around him for a few precious moments.

He doesn’t quite follow the thread of the conversation after that. The kid pulls his mask off and Quentin thinks to himself, “yeah, that’s a child,” until Peter asks about a safe place to go. He briefly considers and discards the possibility of going back to the Sanctum - one person has already found out his secret identity tonight, he doesn’t want to add Strange to that list, not tonight, anyway.

Safe place, first aid kit… Workshop. Portals are always easy for him, and the two of them fall from the roof to a storage locker in Iowa. Or Ohio. Or Idaho. He still isn’t quite sure of which one.

-

Peter stumbles as he falls into a nearly pitch black room, the only light produced by a portal overhead, faint red gold sparks falling around them before Quentin waves a hand and it snaps shut, plunging them back into darkness.

He fumbles around for his phone, turning on the flashlight long enough to find a pull cord overhead, which turns on a glaringly bright fluorescent strip light. He winces for a moment until his eyes adjust, then takes a look around.

It’s like what he always imagined a mad scientist’s lab would look like if it was set up in a garage, minus maybe the bubbling liquids and bunsen burners. There’s a naked wooden mannequin on the wall next to him, a rickety wooden chest of drawers that, from the half-open second drawer, seems to contain a few extra changes of civilian clothes. There’s a cot covered in a messy pile of blankets that Quentin is currently sitting on, clumsily fumbling with the catch for his cape on one side of the room, and on the other is a work desk with a comfortable looking chair, a dark red hoodie draped over the back. There are various shelves and boxes stacked along the walls, some neatly labeled and some not, and every flat surface is covered in pieces of machinery in various states of assembly.

Quentin’s sigh of relief as he finally gets the cape off pulls Peter out of his distracted state and he looks back as Quentin disengages a pair of clasps on either side of the chestpiece and pulls it off over his head before moving to unbuckling the bracers on his arms.

“First aid kit?” Peter asks, looking around in wonder. “And where are we?”

“Bottom drawer,” Quentin answers, flicking a finger towards the desk. “Storage locker. Uh… Iowa, I think. Maybe Ohio. Really should check where this place is again…” he trails off as he pulls the bracers off, then his boots, and begins slowly rummaging through his dresser for civilian clothes.

Peter’s already halfway through opening up the first aid kit and looking for a penlight and some tylenol before the second statement hits him. When he looks back Quentin is out of his armor, which is heaped on the bed next to him, and has pulled on an old maroon tshirt and grey sweatpants and is sitting there staring off into space, rolling something small and metallic between his fingers.

“I’m sorry, did you say we were in Iowa?” he asks incredulously as he passes Quentin a half-filled bottle of water that was left on the desk and a pair of tylenol, which the man takes with a nod.

“Maybe,” Quentin answers with a vague shrug. “Might be Idaho. Or Ohio. Couldn’t keep it straight before tonight anyway. What happened?” He drains the bottle of water and winces as he gently probes the growing goose egg on the back of his head.

“What do you remember?” Peter asks instead, using the penlight to check Quentin’s pupil response. Seems ok, he still wants to get him home to May for a second opinion but between that and his steadily improving coherence from when he found him on the roof, Peter thinks he’ll be ok.

Quentin pauses for a moment, eyes flicking back and forth as he tries to remember. “I finished the suit earlier today. I was going to go find you, show off…” he trails off, shaking his head. “Next thing I remember I’m on the roof, your mask is off, and I took my helmet off as well. Which I’m a little sad about because I was hoping to keep this,” he gestures to Peter, then to the armor, “separate for a bit.”

He carefully stands, keeping on arm wrapped around his chest as he drops the metal object he had in his hand on the nearest shelf top and begins carefully replacing his armor on the mannequin.

Peter picks it up. It’s small, a thin band of metal maybe two inches long and a half inch wide attached to two loops of the same metal. “What’s this?” he asks, watching as Quentin folds the undershirt and pants and places them next to the mannequin before moving on to the actual armor. “And I have a lot of questions.”

“It’s a sling ring. Lets me open portals,” Quentin answers as he clips the cape back to the pauldrons of the chestpiece, then reaches a hand down the back of the chestpiece. Peter can hear a click, then the faint humming coming from the armor stops and the blue glow leaking out from between the strips of metal does as well.

“Sing ring? Portals?” Peter can only parrot his response as he turns the ring over in his hands. There’s nothing technological about this ring, he realizes, it’s solid metal, tarnished by age and engraved with intricate designs.

“Yep.” Quentin pops the P as he repeats the same procedure with his boots. Peter catches a glimpse of a pale purple circle built into each of the heels before it powers down, the color clicking in his mind as Quentin moves on to the helmet.

“Is that antigravity tech?” Peter rushes forward to take a look at the boots and suddenly there’s a glowing red-gold shield between him and them, designs gently spiraling in midair matching those on the run and that’s one question answered, at least. His eyes flick up to Quentin, who has one hand extended, the other still gripping the helmet, and there’s this expression on his face that Peter can’t quite describe. There’s a little bit of anger, a little bit of protectiveness… But Peter is sure there’s also more than a little bit of fear in those wide blue eyes.

“Please don’t touch those,” he says softly, and when Peter nods and backs half a step away he drops the shield and goes back to placing the helmet on the mannequin. The tension in the small room, however, doesn’t fade with the shield, and Peter can see the change in the way Quentin moves – fingers lingering on the helmet for a moment too long, movements stiff like he’s… Peter frowns as he realizes that the man is moving like he expects to be attacked at any moment, his normal affable presence shuttered behind guarded caution. Peter doesn’t move as he carefully sits down on the cot and gestures to the chair at the workbench. “Please, sit,” he says, not making eye contact. “I know you have questions.”

-

Everything is going wrong tonight, Quentin thinks as he watches Peter drag the chair across the room to stand behind it opposite of him. The kid still has his sling ring, and Quentin is confident that without it and in his current state, if Peter decided to attack him, to subdue him and take him in to Stark for stealing from the DDC he’s not certain that he’d be able to get away.

The kid looks at him for a long moment before, “so you can just do that?”

“Do what?”

He gestures vaguely like fireworks in the air before answering, “_that_. The shields? I wasn’t sure if it was technology or some kind of…” he trails off, shrugging, “some kind of magic,” he concludes self-consciously, saying the last word like it was ridiculous, like there was no such thing as magic.

“I can ‘just do that,’ yes,” Quentin answers, summoning a small shield to float above his fingertips for a moment, a twitch of one finger sending it spinning in place before dissolving into sparks.

“What’s the suit for, then?” Peter asks, and Quentin can tell there’s another question there he wanted to ask but didn’t.

So he shrugs again, picking at his thumbnail slightly as he avoided Peter’s eyes. “Protection, transport,” he pauses, gesturing to it again, “Identity concealment, aesthetics. Mostly aesthetics if I’m being honest.”

“Transport? But you can teleport-”

Quentin cuts him off. “I can open portals. I can’t teleport. The suit lets me fly.”

“With antigravity technology. Like that the bank robbers had.” Peter’s voice is surprisingly cold, and Quentin unconcsiouly moves his hands into position to raise a shield between them if he needs it.

He hesitates. “Yes and no.”

“Which is it, Quentin? Yes or no?” When he doesn’t get an immediate answer, Peter continues, “In the bank, you didn’t seem surprised to see the robbers with that tech. Did you make it for them, in this,” he gestures to the cramped interior of the storage locker bitterly, “in this evil lair of yours, and then intend to swing into action to stop them and make yourself look like a hero?”

“You’ve been reading too many conspiracy theories,” Quentin laughs slightly. “Besides, swinging into action is more your thing, and playing both sides is Stark’s.”

That was probably the wrong thing to say, he realizes almost immediately as Peter looks like he’s going to punch him before the tension is shattered by a sudden yodeling ringtone and Peter mutter a quiet curse under his breath before turning away for a moment to grab his phone out of his pocket, head snapping back to Quentin immediately. He had used the break in tension not to run or to fight, but to adjust his position on his cot, hands raised in what was intended to be a placating gesture that he realizes might not be particularly reassuring, considering the abilities he had just displayed.

Quentin slowly lowers his hands, folding his arms across his chest and tucking his hands beneath his arms in what he hopes is enough of a ‘I can’t cast like this gesture.’ Peter’s eyes narrow slightly.

He doesn’t break eye contact as he answers the phone, “Hey, Ned,” he says, and honestly Quentin is impressed that none of the tension in his body bleeds into his voice. “I’m so sorry! I got held up at the Stark Internship. I’ll be home soon, ok?” Why did he look so pointedly at Quentin when he said that? “Uh, yeah, tell May whatever takeout she wants is fine.”

He ends the call and for a moment Quentin mourns the death of flip-phones – he gets the feeling that there would have been something extremely aesthetically satisfying for Peter to have slammed the phone shut just there.

“I don’t like lying to my friends,” Peter says, and Quentin’s brow furrows in confusion at the apparent non sequitur. “You are going to let me go, right?”

“Give me my sling ring back and I’ll have you back in New York in two minutes,” Quentin answers, holding out his hand, “Or you could open the door and be, well again, I’m not sure exactly where we are. But I’m not keeping you here against your will is the point I’m trying to make.”

The kid hesitates, but doesn’t hand over the ring. “You told me you were an engineer.”

“I still am an engineer,” Quentin responds, almost insulted. “I still have my PE and everything. Just not employed as one anymore. I’m not seeing where you’re going with this?” That wasn’t true, he knows exactly where Peter is going with this line of questioning and his reasoning is valid, it just kind of hurts that the kid would think so little of him.

Peter finally sits down in the chair, head resting on his knuckles, hands still curled around the sling ring. “Twenty questions. Ten each, quid pro quo. And you have to answer them honestly. If you seem trustworthy after that,” he uncurls his fingers just enough to let the glint of metal from the sling ring shine through.

“And if not?” Quentin raises an eyebrow.

The fingers close tight again around the sling ring. “I’m Spider-Man,” he says with a shrug, like it should be self explanatory enough what will follow, and Quentin gets the hint.

“Twenty questions, got it. But look, kid,” he says, one last effort to stop this line of inquiry, “I know you’re not going to like some of the answers you’ll get, but I promise I’m not your enemy. I’m not the bad guy.”

“What’s your name,” Peter says, not responding to Quentin’s last comment.

“C’mon, kid, that’s your first question?” he’s a little disappointed, honestly, he was expecting something a little harder hitting than that.

“Yeah, that’s my first question. And that was yours.” Ok, damn, the kid isn’t even in the neighborhood of fucking around.

Quentin leans back slightly on the cot, adjusting himself so he’s up against the back wall. “Quentin Anthony Beck,” he answers with a shrug, noting the surprise on Peter’s face. “What, were you really expecting my name to not be Quentin? Don’t answer that, you know that was a rhetorical question. But actually, how old are you? I’m calling you kid because you are one, but I’ve gotta know how young you are and still got dragged into this mess.”

“I’m fifteen,” Peter answers defensively, “And I didn’t get _dragged_ anywhere. After I got bit, it wasn’t like I could sit back with these powers and not do anything. It would have been selfish. Where did you get all of this?”

“Maryland.” Quentin tries to leave it at that, but he can see Peter’s frown deepen and he sighs, runs a hand through his hair, and elaborates, “A Department of Damage Control vault.”

“You stole from the DDC?” Peter’s voice is incredulous, but Quentin raises a finger, shaking his head.

“My turn. You said Stark saved your life. How?” He needs to know just how deeply this kid’s debt to that bastard goes.

“When I was a kid, my aunt and uncle took me to the Stark Expo. We were there the night of the Hamer Industries presentation.” Oh shit. Shit. Quentin’s breath catches in his throat as the memories of that night flood back through his mind and he barely listens as the kid continues, “I got separated from them. A drone mistook me for Iron Man – I was wearing a costume helmet and gloves – and Mister Stark saved my life.”

Yeah, wonderful, Quentin thinks bitterly. Your hero saved you from a problem he caused.

“Why do you hate Mister Stark so much?” Alright then, finally going right for the jugular but still dancing around the big questions that Quentin knows he wants to ask. “And why weren’t you an Avenger, if you have powers? Were you on Captain America’s side during the Accords and that’s why you don’t like Stark? But why go vigilante now? I just,” Peter looks at him with pleading eyes, “None of what you’re doing makes sense, and I want to know why.”

“That’s a lot more than one question, Peter,” Quentin says softly, but he gets the feeling the game is over anyway. “But I’ll answer them. Do you want the long version or the short version?”

“I want the truth.”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “They’re both true, one’s just a little more succinct. Long version it is, I guess.” He puts his head in his hands for a moment, running his hands through his hair before straightening back up. “I worked for Stark Industries for almost a decade. I was there form the beginning – the first Iron Man suit, the Expo, the Battle of New York, all of it. I ran the holographic simulations department.”

He pauses as Peter squints at him like he’s trying to remember something, “Wait, you had a booth at the Expo? Were you the guy with the cat?”

Quentin smiles slightly, “Yeah, I was the guy with the cat. After the Ultron debacle things started to change at Stark Industries. My project proposals were getting turned down and the one that did get accepted… Well, he claimed credit for himself and then fired me when I confronted him.”

“Wait, that’s it? You were an engineer for Mister Stark, and he fired you? That’s it?” The kid looks confused and Quentin holds up a hand, shaking his head.

“I don’t hate Stark,” he says, and it’s true. “I don’t like him, or what he stands for, but more importantly I don’t respect him. For every life he saved with the Iron Man suit he could cave a thousand with the money he spends on it by trying to address the real problems with society. You and I,” he gestures to Peter, then to himself, “We do what we do because we understand the responsibility that comes with having powers, and we respect the power itself. Stark just likes the fame, the attention. If he wasn’t such a narcissist he would use the money he wastes on the suit for, I don’t know,” he throws his hands in the air and winces as Peter flinches back, “ending world hunger or something.”

“So if you worked for Stark, why were you just an engineer? What start being a superhero now?” Peter’s mouth twists into a sarcastic smile that seems out of place on his face, “If it’s so selfish to not use your powers for good, after all?”

“Kid, I’ve been a sorcerer for less than three months. I’ve been combat ready for less than a third of that. And besides, you know my hang-ups about it. I told you my doubts, just,” Quentin shrugs, “In metaphors.”

And then it finally clicks in Peter’s head and Quentin can see the moment he jumps to the wrong conclusion as he puts the sling ring in a pocket of his suit and holds Quentin at webslinger-point with one hand and reaches for his phone with the other. “Don’t move,” he warns as Quentin tries to get up, tries to explain or diffuse the situation, “I’m calling Mister Stark, and you can tell him all about the weapons your boss is selling.”

“Hold on, wait, what?” Quentin thought he was getting through to the kid but apparently somewhere he’d messed up. “Strange isn’t selling any weapons. I’m not making weapons, Peter, if you’d just listen,” he tries to reach for Peter’s hand and the kid fires before he’s moved more than an inch, a glob of sticky webbing impacting and sticking his hand at an uncomfortable angle to the wall behind him, “Peter, please don’t call Stark, I promise this is all a misunderstanding.”

Peter’s finger hesitates on the call button. “Explain, then.”

“I knew someone was stealing from the DDC vaults, and I also knew that I needed armor and a mask of some sort if I was going to survive going vigilante and not get kicked out by Strange – who is my… mentor, I suppose, not my evil boss,” he adds, “He told me that if I used what he was teaching me to help individuals rather than stop large scale threats he wouldn’t teach me anymore.”

The webshooter wavers for a moment, “You swear you’re not making weapons? You didn’t seem surprised to see the bank robbers with the antigravity gun.”

“I was surprised to see _them_ with it,” Quentin replies, “but not the gun, no. Like I said, I knew someone was stealing from the DDC. I was even planning on tipping you off to it and helping you go after them.”

“But not until you’d stolen some technology for yourself.” Peter sighs but finally drops the webshooter from its position pointed at Quentin’s chest. “You’ve got kind of a messed up sense of morality, man.” He pulls a bottle of something clear from his belt and sprays it on the webbing on Quentin’s hand, and he can feel the strands loosen slightly.

He shrugs in response to Peter’s last comment. “I’m not hurting anyone,” he explains, “And it’s not like anyone else is using this stuff. It’s been in storage for five years. I’m not hurting anyone with it. The other people who are stealing from the DDC, they’re the dangerous ones.”

He finally pulls his hand free from the wall, carefully pulling the webbing off his fingers that was left, peeling it like half-dried glue. “I think we’d make a good team, but you’d have to trust me. And I promise I have never, and will never, lie to you, Peter. Have I spoken in metaphors? Yes. Have I left things out, not told the whole truth? Yes. But lie? No.”

Peter watches as Quentin extends his hand out, angled just enough that it could be for a handshake or for his sling ring back. He stares at it for a moment as Quentin gives him a half smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “C’mon,” he says, smiling for real now as he wiggles his fingers, “trust me here, Peter.”

For a moment it looks like Peter is going to go along with it. He pulls the sling ring out of his belt pocket, hesitantly holding it just out of Quentin’s reach, then pauses as the smile drops off Quentin’s face, his eyes widening in fear.

Quentin grabs the ring as Peter turns to see what he saw: the metal door at the other side of the room is glowing red hot in the center as something melts its way through.

Peter turns back to him. “Is this you?”

Quentin hurriedly shakes his head. His first instinct is to open a portal, to get him and Peter the hell out of there, but he hesitates – he can’t allow all the tech he’s built and squirreled away here to fall into the wrong hands. “Stay behind me, kid,” he says, even as a glowing red-gold wall materializes in the center of the room.

Peter nods, pulling his mask on and crouching next to the cot, ready for an attack as the unknown intruder finishes cutting a hole in the wall. It falls over into the room and Quentin winces as it smashes into a set of projector lenses he was fixing, then freezes in fear as he identifies the intruder.

“Quentin Beck,” says the mechanical voice of Tony Stark through the mask of the Iron Man suit, “What the hell did you do to my kid?”


	6. persona non grata

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "_persona non grata_"  
A person not appreciated. Are we talking about Tony or Quentin, here? Also featuring one of the most scathing 'the reason you suck' speeches I've ever written.

Tony gets an alert on his phone telling him that the Spider-Man suit has left New York City while he’s in the middle of his third update to Rhodey’s exoskeleton design. Initially he dismisses it – he’d checked earlier that night on Peter’s whereabouts and he’d been in Queens, like normal.

But something doesn’t feel right. His technology doesn’t just glitch out and say someone was a few hundred miles away from where they were. He swipes the hologram he was working on away and calls to the ceiling, “FRIDAY, be a dear and run a diagnostic on the Spider-Man suit Mk. I for me, will you?”

“Already done, Boss,” comes the voice of his AI. “No issues detected. A ping off of Peter Parker’s cell phone confirms him to be in Marietta, Ohio.”

A holographic map appears next to Tony of the eastern United States, a tiny holographic spider symbol blinking at Peter’s current location. Worry clenches in his stomach. He’s been avoiding Peter since Germany for a whole host of reasons, most of them bad, but he can’t ignore _this_.

He starts running for the top floor of the Avengers Compound immediately, calling to FRIDAY as he does, “Let Pepper know I’m going out. Queue up – how long is the flight?”

“Approximately thirty minutes at top speed,” FRIDAY answers helpfully.

“Queue up the last thirty minutes of footage from the mask to the suit HUD and engage autopilot.” Tony bursts up the last flight of stairs onto the roof. The suit assembles around him in seconds, and they’re off.

Tony watches the footage. It seems like Peter’s night was going normally – a few bicycle thieves, a few stuck cats, and then… ATM robbers. He knows Peter can handle a few petty thieves, so he doesn’t start worrying until he sees the anti-grav gun.

“FRIDAY, analyze footage and any sensor readings of that weapon. Have we seen anything like it before?”

There’s a very slight pause before the feed of Peter’s exploits pauses, minimizes, and is replaced with new images and information scrolling across Tony’s vision. “Energy readings match those of Chitauri energy sources used during the Battle of New York. Low level radiation from them has been consistently measured across New York City since the Battle, likely from leftover debris not picked up by Damage Control crews. And…” FRIDAY hesitates for a moment, “wherever Peter is now is a major hotspot.”

Shit. Tony desperately tries to flatten himself out into a more streamlined shape but he can already feel the growing warmth from the repulsors in the suit boots and palms overheating from firing at full capacity long term. “Keep rolling the footage,” he instructs, and FRIDAY does so. His stomach drops as Peter gets caught in the anti-grav field. For a moment, he hopes the arrival of the newcomer is a good sign before he gets blasted across the street.

Honestly, though, he’s impressed at how quickly Peter is able to clean up the fight after that. He instructs FRIDAY to have someone pick up the gun from the roof where Peter left it, and then he sees the face of the newcomer and there’s something familiar about it. He squints his eyes, trying to remember the face as the recording ends.

“FRIDAY, run facial recognition on our caped crusader, and tell me why the feed cut out.” Tony can feel the autopilot disengage as he nears a building labeled ‘Marietta Self-Storage.’ The lights surrounding it are off, and it doesn’t seem like there’s anyone around this time of day.

He lands, creeping closer to the rows of garage-like doors as FRIDAY answers his query. “Peter removed his mask after identifying Quentin Beck as the man on the roof, and the Baby Monitor Protocol is only designed to be engaged when the mask is being worn.”

Oh, no. The implications of that shakes Tony to his core and he freezes for a moment, mere yards from where Peter’s tracker blinks on his HUD. He remembers the last encounter with Beck – the man had been almost unhinged, ranting about Tony stealing his life’s work before he almost broke Tony’s jaw with a mean right hook.

For Peter to remove his mask around him meant that Beck knew his secret identity, meant that the unstable engineer had wormed his way into Peter’s trust, and why?

Why had Beck kidnapped Peter here with some sort of teleportation technology? The man certainly didn’t have powers when Tony knew him, he was nothing but a hologram technician. A good one, Tony would give him that, but nothing else.

An infrared overlay from his helmet shows him where to cut through the metal entrance to the locker where Beck is holding Peter, and as soon as the cut is finished he kicks it in, stepping over a desk as he raises a repulsor to point at Beck.

“Quentin Beck,” he says as menacingly as possible and is gratified to see the glint of fear in the engineer’s eyes from behind some sort of forcefield, “What the hell did you do to my kid?”

-

All Quentin can do for a moment beyond keeping the shield up between him and Stark is to blink in utter confusion, then look down at Peter. “Did you call him? I thought you weren’t going to call him!”

Peter shakes his head and straightens out of his defensive crouch, pulling his mask back off his head. “No, uh, Mister Stark? What are you doing here?”

Stark pops the faceplate on his armor, expression stern. “You think I don’t notice when the tracking beacon on your suit says you instantaneously went from New York to Ohio?”

“Ohio, right,” Quentin mutters to himself as Stark gives him a sharp look. “Well, you’ve checked out the situation, Peter’s fine, you can go now. If you’re feeling generous, repairing the door would be nice because the security deposit for this place was not small.”

“Everything really is fine, Mister Stark,” Peter adds nervously, sensing the tension between the two adults, “You could have just called me or something.”

The helmet snaps back down into place over Stark’s face and he raises his other hand so both gauntets are pointing their repulsors directly at Quentin. “Where’s the real Peter?”

Quentin is so caught off guard by that that he can only let out a surprised laugh, looking down at Peter, who shrugs, also confused. “This is the real Peter. I don’t know what you’re on, Stark, but-”

“Lemme guess, you kidnapped Peter and were going to use some sort of hologram of him to throw me off guard. I’ve learned, Beck,” Stark spits, the repulsor beginning to glow, “to keep track of people I’ve personally pissed off because they tend to come after me or people I care about. And when a holographic technician drops off the map for a few months and comes back with powers he uses to kidnap someone I care about I’m not going to let that slide. Now, where is Peter?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Quentin throws his arms in the air in frustration, letting the shield die and turning to Peter, “Go over there. Maybe you’ll have more luck getting through to him,” he starts to say before a repulsor blast nails him in the back and he’s sent flying into the far wall, landing in a boneless heap on the cot after only managing to get the first word out.

Peter is frozen in indecision between rushing to Stark and convincing him he’s real and helping Quentin. Luckily, he pauses long enough for Quentin to carefully push himself back to a sitting position, clutching the shoulder that impacted the wall while staring at Stark murderously.

“I don’t have time for this,” he snarls. “Stark, that’s Peter. I’m not just another person you snubbed in the past who decided that they’re going to ruin your life.” He jabs two fingers towards Stark while meeting his metal-plated eyes, “The best revenge is living well, Stark, so fuck off and let me do that. And one more thing,” he stands, still clutching his shoulder and gesturing with a nod of his head, “what _fucking_ right do you have to call Peter your kid? You recruited a child-”

“I’m not a child,” Peter cuts in, but any further comment is stopped by an inarticulate hiss from Quentin, who continues his rant.

“You recruited a _child_ to fight some of the most dangerous people on the planet because your couldn’t sit down and make compromises like _adults_ and then you gave that same child a superhero costume and ignored him for five months.”

Even though Quentin is several inches shorter than Stark in the suit, his anger is enough to make Stark take a hesitant step back. Logically, Stark thinks, he’s not in any danger here, right? The guy’s an engineer, so he built a suit. And since he’s not wearing it, although props to the guy for managing to look threatening in a t-shirt and sweats, he shouldn’t be a danger.

Quentin continues, teeth bared, “And even if I was the next Aldrich Killian, or Ivan Vanko, or even Baron fucking Zemo, why the hell would I take on an actual superhero I’d have no reason to believe that you even cared about? If I wanted to hurt you I’d go after Miss Potts, or Mister Hogan, or if I still wanted to be an idiot and go after a superhero I’d imagine that Colonel Rhodes would be a pretty easy target right now, huh?”

At this point he’s only a foot or two away from Stark, wounded and defiant. “But I’m not an idiot, Stark. I’m an engineer, and a fucking good one. I mean, you hired me, right?” Seemingly done with his rant, Quentin begins to turn away and Stark takes the opportunity to take a swing at him – a broken jaw would probably suck but he wants to shut this asshole up.

Things go downhill from there for Stark. His fist doesn’t connect with fragile flesh and bone, instead stopping short on a shield of the same reddish-gold energy that Quentin had created earlier.

Stark freezes at the almost feral expression of victory on Quentin’s face, icy blue eyes open wide as he stares up at Stark, “Unfortunately for you, I’m also a sorcerer. Good bye, Stark, I’m sure we’ll speak again soon.”

And Quentin moves, the shield suddenly vanishing and being replaced by a portal edged by glowing reddish-gold sparks that rushes past Stark, snapping shut behind him.

-

The change in demeanor once Stark vanishes in Quentin is incredible. Peter watches as he hunches over into himself, wincing as he goes back to grabbing his shoulder and carefully sits down in the chair. “Ohhhh, that was dumb,” he mutters, closing his eyes for a long moment before looking up at Peter.

Any traces of his anger towards Stark are gone, replaced instead with exhaustion. “Sorry you had to see that, kid,” he says softly before looking away, back at the ground.”

“Uhhh, where did you send him?” Peter asks, looking around the room as if he might pop back in at any moment.

“Just back to New York. I needed some breathing room,” Quentin mutters, carefully standing back up. “I figure we’ve got maybe half an hour until he comes back, assuming he turns around immediately. Although,” he cocks his head towards Peter as if considering something, “You need to go home, kid. Don’t make your friend worry about you any more than he already is.”

And the halo of sparks rushes past him and Peter is standing on the roof where he had found Quentin originally. It’s fully night now, the police are still crawling around the bank across the street, lights flashing and crime scene tape up, and suddenly he’s very tired and wants nothing more than to just go home and sleep for several days.

Which he can’t do, because it’s Wednesday. So he carefully makes his way to where he left his backpack (it’s not there, of course it’s not, can today get any better?) and has to break into his own room, and he’s so distracted and preoccupied by the events of the night that he doesn’t even notice Ned is in the room until it’s too late.

“You’re Spider-Man?” Ned says as he drops the carefully constructed framework of the Lego Death Stark he had been working on and Peter’s protests sound weak even to his ears. He gets changed as quickly as he can – just in time, in fact, for May to poke her head through the door.

“Peter!” she says with a smile, “I didn’t hear you come in! I was just about to run and get the food, so you two behave, ok?”

Ned stammers an affirmative with a dumb grin and May walks out, leaving the two of them alone. Peter collapses onto the couch as Ned paces back and forth, stammering out questions like, “how did this happen?” and “how do you do this and the Stark Industries internship?”

Peter wants nothing more than to crawl into bed and go to sleep and not think about everything that just happened, but Ned’s his friend, so he answers as curtly as possible. Somehow, Ned doesn’t seem to pick up on his mood.

He moans and curls further into the couch as there’s a knock on the door. “Ned, can you get that?” he asks, gratified as Ned nods and heads over, “It’s probably May and she forgot her keys or wallet or something.”

“Uhh, that’s not Mrs. Parker,” Ned says as he opens the door.

“And you’re not Peter,” comes the reply, and Peter all but jumps to his feet as he hears the voice of Tony Stark in his apartment.

“Ned, Ned, hey, buddy,” Peter places a hand on Ned’s shoulder and gently guides him past Tony, “I think you need to leave now, it’s getting late.”

“Is he here about,” Ned pauses, then mouths, “Spider-Man?”

Peter gives him a shrug and a ‘get out of here’ gesture, and Ned finally leaves.

“Does everyone know your secret identity?” Tony asks, placing a hand on Peter’s shoulder once the door is closed behind them.

“Ned was an accident,” Peter answers, shrugging off Tony’s hand while heading to sit in one of the chairs opposite the couch, “Why are you here, Mister Stark? I would have thought you’ve be going after Quentin.”

Tony rolls his eyes and sits opposite Peter on the couch. “I told you to call me Tony how many times, but he’s _Quentin_?”

“He didn’t give me his last name until today,” Peter says uncomfortably, “Look, I don’t know what you have against him and I don’t really want to get involved but…”

Tony has a lot of things he wants to say, but he zeroes in on Peter’s last comment. “But? Peter, please don’t tell me you believe one word out of that lunatic’s mouth.”

Peter shrugs. “But I’ve been calling Happy every day since you dropped me off in New York about doing, y’know, Avengers stuff, and I haven’t even seen you before now. I figured you’d decided that I wasn’t good enough to be an Avenger, so you were ignoring me until I’d proven myself.”

“And what, you thought _Quentin Beck_ was going to give you a chance to do that?” Tony shakes his head. Jesus, the guy really got to Peter with whatever magic mumbo jumbo he’d been peddling.

“You keep saying his name like he’s Ultron, or Loki, or something,” Peter says, exasperated, “When we met I don’t think he had any idea we were connected at all, he just needed someone to talk to.”

“So he wormed his way into your trust, then makes a scene of being a hero in front of you once he realized he had it.” It’s worse than he thought, Tony realizes. The kid’s genuinely defending that sociopath.

“It’s not like that,” Peter tries to explain, his voice calm but shaking every few words, “He told me all about his history with you, why he doesn’t like you as a person, and while I don’t agree with a lot of his reasoning, I really don’t think that he has any ill will towards you. He just wants to be better than you, like, as a person. And a hero, I guess.” He shrugs, and Tony sighs, reaching into his jacket to pull out a tablet, which he hands over to Peter.

“Take a look at that and tell me if you’re still so pro-Quentin Beck after you’ve finished.” Tony stands and begins making his way to the door.

“Wait, where are you going?” Peter calls, now standing as well, tablet held loosely in one hand.

“Well, let’s see,” Tony says, bitingly sarcastic, “I have to go see if the maniac with a shed full of stolen technology is still in said shed.”

And he leaves, the thud of the door behind him somehow extremely final. Peter looks down at the tablet with worried trepidation – what could Quentin have done to make Tony mistrust him so much?

-

Peter procrastinates looking at the tablet Tony gave him for as long as his curious, teenage mind can handle. He has an awkward but mercifully brief dinner with May –

(“Where’s Ned?” “Oh, he went home. Wasn’t feeling too well.” “…Ok, then. More leftovers for us for tomorrow, then!”)

\- does whatever homework he can after losing another backpack, even tries to play some video games but the tablet sits on his desk, sleek and accusing, and Peter can’t ignore it for any longer.

He picks up his phone, tapping open the texting app and messages Quentin. “Hey, you’d tell me if you were evil, right?”

The message status goes from Delivered to Read, 11:32 PM, and stays that way long enough for Peter to wonder if Quentin is going to respond at all before the text bubble comes up, “Not evil.”

Then a pause, and another message, “What did Stark say about me?”

Peter snaps a picture of the tablet and sends it to Quentin, “He gave me this. Told me to look at it and see how I felt after that.”

There’s another long pause followed by another short message from Quentin, “Have you?”

“Not yet,” texts back Peter. “Should I?”

“Will you trust me if I say no?” comes the almost immediate response from Quentin, and Peter can picture the wry smile on his face, the way he’d roll his eyes after making a sarcastic comment.

But he has to answer honestly, “I don’t know,” he replies. “Probably not.”

This message gets left on read for almost twenty minutes before Quentin responds, “I told you the truth. Nothing Stark can show you will change that.”

So Peter settles into the bottom bunk of his bed, and begins to scroll through the documentation Stark gave him.

-

There’s much more there than he was expecting. Years of performance reviews and updates to his employee file, a folder labeled ‘Psych Evals’ that Peter skips for now, not willing to compromise Quentin’s privacy that much – not yet, anyway.

So he checks the folder labeled ‘Employment History’ and learns with steadily growing horror exactly why Stark is so scared of Quentin. The man is brilliant, maybe even as smart as Stark himself, but with as much reason to hate him as others that have turned over the years. Peter watches uncomfortably as the tablet shows him footage taken from the holographic simulations lab of Quentin telling a new hire in a terrifyingly calm, cold, precise voice exactly what he thought of Stark’s involvement with the Expo.

Peter checks the date stamp – 2011, almost six years ago. And if it wasn’t for the fact that he’d been told explicitly that the man he was watching was Quentin, he wouldn’t have believed it. There’s none of the warmth in his voice or fluidity in his movements that Peter’s come to associate with the man. Even his face is more angular, accentuated by his lack of beard and the way his hair is slicked back.

Reading further deepens his concern. Performance reports begin to characterize Quentin as unstable and obsessed with his work. There’s notes from his supervisor about the suggestion of mandated counseling, but the issue is dropped after the Battle of New York after he sees a therapist and Stark Industries has more pressing matters to deal with.

His fingers ghost over the link to the psych eval taken after the Battle of New York, caught between desperately wanting to know and not wanting to invade Quentin’s privacy any more than he already has.

But Quentin had sort of given him permission, right? Peter’s curiosity gets the better of him and he taps the link, stomach dropping as he reads the contents of the evaluation. The therapist’s notes are clinical, dispassionate. There’s terminology that Peter doesn’t understand, but he catches the buzzwords.

Untreated bipolar depression, currently exhibiting an ongoing manic phase. Untreated PTSD. Patient displays notable resentment towards Tony Stark and the Avengers. Patient denies need for further treatment and becomes agitated at the suggestion. Suggest observation in lieu of further mandated sessions due to high intelligence and history of previous outbursts.

Quentin was on a list, Peter realizes. He was on a list of victims of circumstance of Stark’s actions with the means and intelligence to take revenge when they finally snap.

But the question here really is whether he snapped, Peter thinks, continuing to go through the information on the tablet, picking up speed as the clock approaches three in the morning.

As the dates begin to approach April, Peter thinks that everything may have been an exaggeration. Quentin is clearly working towards his own version of therapy with the ATTHI device, and when everything falls apart around him Peter is just as surprised as Quentin must have been.

There’s little left in the file by the time Peter watches the footage of Quentin’s final meeting with Stark other than a few notes on his activities, and a final notice a little under three months ago that Quentin had completely dropped off the face of the Earth.

And Peter is left, exhausted, as his wake-up alarm begins to sound and he sits up in bed, trying to figure out exactly what Stark was trying to accomplish in giving him Quentin’s file.

No, that’s not quite right. Peter knows what Stark was trying to accomplish. Stark was trying to show Peter what he believed to be Quentin’s true nature.

And Peter has to admit, if he had seen this before meeting and talking with Quentin he might have agreed with Stark’s assessment of the man. He didn’t blame Stark for being paranoid, given his history with people he’d pissed off. And the file in combination with Quentin’s newfound powers and his suit would be enough to reasonable make someone with Stark’s history think he might be a threat.

All that, plus him teleporting himself and peter several hundred miles away and using technology that matched that of what the ATM robbers had in potential origin all seemed to be very conclusive evidence on the surface.

So Peter doesn’t blame Stark for his reaction, but he’s sure, in his core, that Stark is wrong about Quentin. He may not like Stark, but he’s not a threat, and he’s not using Peter to get to him.

But in the end, that’s just a feeling, and Peter knows it’s at least partially his fault that Stark is going after Quentin now. He needs some sort of proof one way or the other to get Stark off of Quentin’s case.

Or, proof that Quentin is an enemy that Spider-Man needs to help take down. An Iron Man level threat, Peter thinks with no real humor as he throws on school clothes and sends one last message to Quentin before running out of the apartment to catch his morning train:

“We need to talk.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy November, folks! I am doing NaNoWriMo this year, and as such will be taking a break from this project for the upcoming month. I do have one more chapter for this already written, which will be posted in two (2) weeks to try and bridge the gap better. With any luck, the regular posting schedule will be resumed in December.


	7. flectere si nequeo superos, acheronta movebo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "_flectere si nequeo superos, acheronta movebo_"  
If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell. Quentin makes his ultimatum.

The moment the portal snaps shut around Peter, Quentin knows he’s started a timer. He has at best forty-five minutes, maybe an hour if the kid manages to stall for time, before Iron Man comes back to take Quentin in.

Or worse, take him out. And not on a date.

He runs his hands through his hair in panic, frantically turning in circles as he tries to figure out what to do. He has no backup, no plan to follow for when someone found his hideout. If he had more time he’d find another storage facility, somewhere more remote, move his stuff, pay in cash like here, but he doesn’t have time for that.

He checks his phone for the time - a little after eight. Where can he go? He’s not dragging Victoria into this mess, and he’s certainly not running back to Strange with his tail between his legs.

He needs somewhere hidden, somewhere secure. Somewhere Iron Man won’t find him after ten minutes, so somewhere off the grid. For a brief moment he thinks about staying, disabling Stark and the suit for long enough to move properly instead of fleeing with the bare minimum, but his chest aches enough that he can’t take in a full breath, he can barely move the shoulder that his the wall, and while at this point he doesn’t think he has a concussion, he head pounds whenever he moves it too quickly. He’s not in fighting condition right now, and he doesn’t want to further secure his position on Stark’s shit list more than he already has anyway.

So what should he do? Quentin checks his phone again - almost five minutes have passed. It’s only has he begins stuffing a few changes of clothes and some of his more delicate and hard to replace tools into an old duffle bag that he sees it - an old trail map from his time in Acadia camping after the Battle of New York.

He thinks for a moment, remembering a cave he had explored once by the side of the road. It’s not a long term solution. It’s barely a short term solution. It’s not secure, anyone could stumble in on his stuff, but for a night?

For a night it could work.

He barely hesitates, turning off his phone completely, then opens a portal.

-

When Tony arrives back at the storage locker, it’s clear Beck moved out in a hurry. Most of the furniture other than the cot, mannequin, and dresser was left behind, as was a good deal of the technology Beck was tinkering with.

There’s a large manila envelope with a note written on it that Tony snatches, reading in amusement,  _ “My sincerest apologies for the damage done to your facility. I will be ending my rental of this unit effective immediately, and have enclosed the next month’s worth of rent. With any luck, this will be enough to aid in the repair of the facility. Should it come short, please bill Tony Stark for the remainder of the balance. Yours sincerely, Quentin Beck.” _

Tony scoffs and tosses the envelope aside, taking a look at the equipment left behind. It’s mostly cheap, mundane wiring, fittings, and metal scraps, but he can see a single Chitauri energy core left on the desk, and a set of half-repaired hologram projectors in a large plastic tub off to the side.

“FRIDAY, how long would it take to get a clean-up crew here?” he asks, opening drawers to see what else the engineer had squirreled away in here.

“Approximately two hours, Boss. Should I give the order?”

Tony nods and wanders back out of the locker, looking around to see if Beck had left any indication of where he’d gone. Unsurprisingly, but disappointingly, there were none. He takes off into the sky, expanding his field of view.

“FRIDAY, Milk Carton Protocol on Quentin Beck.” There’s a pause as the AI activated the tracking algorithms Tony had developed, then…

“Mister Beck’s phone is pinging from a free WiFi hotspot not far from the Stark Industries campus in California. Several security cameras and the background of four Instagram photos posted in the last fifteen minutes corroborate his location.” The images and camera footage in question overlay themselves on Tony’s HUD, and with that confirmation he’s about to head for California before something occurs to him.

“FRIDAY, how long would it take to get to his current location?”

She answers almost immediately. “No less than three hours, Boss.”

“Odds that this is a trap or a ploy to get me away from New York and Peter?”

There’s another, almost imperceptible, pause before FRIDAY answers, “Seventy-three point three-eight percent, Boss.”

As much as Tony is itching to fly to California and wrap his gauntleted fingers around Beck’s neck and squeeze until the asshole told him what he was up to, he recognizes the folly of trying to chase a man who can make portals.

“Alright. Shit,” mutters Tony, still floating over the storage facility. “Alert me whenever he comes within a twenty minute flight radius of me, and prep the travel suit with knockout darts.”

Technology or magic, Tony knows as he finally turns back towards New York City that it’s hard to do anything when you’re unconscious. “And FRIDAY, cancel my travel plans. I’m not leaving New York City undefended with a potential supervillain attack on the horizon.”

-

There are a handful of places that Quentin knows no matter how much time passes, he’ll always be able to picture clearly enough to portal to.

There’s the roof, of course. His room and the entryway to the Sanctum. His campsite in Maine. His childhood bedroom would also count if he didn’t know that the house had long since been sold.

So he chooses his next clearest memory to hide, regroup, figure out what his next move should be.

Between wanting a public space and wanting to put some distance between himself and Stark, the obvious place to go was a 24-hour diner near the Stark Industries campus in California. He figures that will give him a few hours at least until Stark comes after him, and maybe that will be enough time to make a plan.

The waitress drops off his coffee at the table and moves away quickly, her eyes darting to take in his disheveled appearance before putting a safe distance between them. Quentin can’t blame her - he looks like a mess. He’s soaked through from moving his things in the rain and trying to find the cave, and his boots are covered in mud.

To make things worse, he thinks, it’s not raining anywhere near here, so he must look like he just crawled out of a sewer. He pours sugar into his coffee, enough that even mediocre diner coffee will be palatable, and pulls out his phone.

One new text from Peter. “Hey, you’d tell me if you were evil, right?”

Seems like the kid talked to Stark after all. And factoring in the time zone difference… Quentin realizes that maybe Stark isn’t coming for him at all, right now.

“Not evil,” he replies, downing his sugar water masquerading as coffee and sets his phone aside as he manages to flag down his waitress.

“More coffee?” she asks, eyes flicking between his empty mug and disheveled self, probably hoping that the answer was ‘no, check please.’

“Yes,” Quentin answers, “and a, uh,” he gestures vaguely towards the specials page of the menu, “turkey dinner special, please.”

She nods, grabs the menu from him, and hurries away. Quentin hopes she’ll come back soon with more coffee. He can feel the adrenaline letdown on the horizon and really needs just a little more time before he crashes.

He opens the messaging app on his phone again, pausing for a moment before sending, “What did Stark say about me?”

The reply comes almost immediately, and his stomach drops. There’s an image of a StarkTech tablet and a response, “He gave me this. Told me to look at it and see how I felt after that.”

Shit. Tony was playing dirty, and any attempt on Quentin’s part to ask Peter not to read it would just make him look like the guilty party in all of this. He manages to give the waitress a quick smile as she refills his coffee mug before hurrying off again, and he taps out another quick response. “Have you?”

“Not yet. Should I?”

The obvious answer to Quentin is “oh god, please don’t. Stark isn’t exactly known for being an unbiased person,” but what he replies instead is, “will you trust me if I say no?”

He knows what the answer to that will be but prays for a miracle, swearing quietly as the response comes back.

“I don’t know,” the message reads, “probably not.”

Well, that’s the answer then, isn’t it. He procrastinates giving Peter a real answer, stopping to thank the waitress who brings him his meal and another cup of coffee. He catches a glimpse of himself in the silver napkin holder and winces - his hair has dried into a crunchy mess, half-washed out product mixed with dirty water that dripped onto his head from the cave ceiling and his habit of running his hands through his hair when he’s stressed combining to give his hair the look of not having been washed in several days. His face is paler than usual too, streaked with grime from cave water where he missed wiping it off originally, and seems to be set in a permanent, unconscious grimace exacerbated by every movement he makes sending a spike of pain from his injured shoulder.

It’s diner food and diner coffee but Quentin is sure he’s never eaten anything so delicious. He’s nearly cleaned his plate by the time he decides how to answer Peter. “I’ve told you the truth. Nothing Stark can show you can change that.”

He shuts off his phone after that, not wanting to deal with any other questions. His food is gone now, and so is most of the cash he had on hand, and although he knows it must be well after midnight back in New York, it’s barely past nine here. He leaves the last of his cash on the table to pay his tab and leave a generous tip, then stuffs his hands in the pockets of his well-worn sweatpants and hurries off, doing his best to ignore the curious stares of people he passes.

He passes an ATM and briefly debates the idea of withdrawing cash, trying to go off-grid, but he knows there’s no point to that. No one can truly go off-grid anymore in this world of surveillance, and if Stark is coming for him, paying for a room in a hotel with cameras is the same with cash or with card. 

And there is a hotel not far from the diner - his parents would stay there occasionally when they’d come out to the west coast to visit him, and it’s barely a ten minute walk before he stumbles into the lobby, rucksack hefted over his shoulder. It’s nice inside - nicer than he remembers, or maybe he’s just shabbier by comparison, and he walks up to the front desk.

The young man (his nametag labels him as Kevin, which Quentin thinks fits him pretty well) behind the desk makes a show of looking Quentin over before saying, “Can I help you?” in a tone that makes it clear that the help he’d like to give would be to show him the door.

“I need a room for the night,” Quentin says, not missing the flash of disgust on the receptionist’s face before he taps a few keys and brings up a room list, displaying their prices. 

“Do you have a reservation?” Quentin shakes his head, and Kevin continues on, “It looks like we have one room that may suit your needs.” He taps the listing on the screen, and Quentin winces slightly at the price but hands over his card. The flash of surprise on Kevin’s face when the card is accepted isn’t lost on Quentin.

“Room 314. Checkout is at 10 am.”

Wordlessly, Quentin takes the offered room key and trudges upstairs. He wants nothing more than to collapse onto the bed on the far side of the room, but he peels off his dirty clothing first and takes a shower until he’s not sure he can stand up any longer. He uses the last of the hotel shampoo and soap to clean his dirty clothing before pulling on a fresh set, then collapses bonelessly into bed.

Sleep comes quickly.

-

The morning sun streams through the window at just the right angle to shine directly into Quentin’s eyes. He flails for a moment, disoriented, before relaxing and groaning as he remembers exactly what happened the previous night. His body aches in protest at the unexpected movement.

He checks the clock on the bedside table - 8:30. He has an hour and a half to get ready for the day before he has to check out. His clothes from the night before are still damp, unwearable, but he wrings them out the best he can before throwing them in a plastic bag and tossing them through a portal to the cave in Main.

It’s barely past nine when he wanders out the front door of the hotel and into a nearby coffee shop, where he sits by a window and sips his coffee and picks at a croissant while turning his phone over in his hand. Stark may not have come for him in the night, but broadcasting his location still feels like tempting fate.

Then again, Quentin thinks as he surreptitiously surveys the inside of the shop, there are no less than three security cameras that would have caught him walking in, and a group of college-age girls taking pictures of their drinks at the table behind him meant that there was almost no chance his face wasn’t on instagram already, albeit blurry and out of focus. The 21st century means that anonymity is a thing of the past, after all, and if Stark wanted to come after him he’d have no difficulty doing that. So one more thing broadcasting his location ultimately won’t make a difference.

He turns on his phone, and is almost disappointed by the lack of messages, which leaves him at something of a loss. What the hell is he supposed to do now? Returning to the east coast carries with it the implicit threat of a fight between himself and Iron Man, and while he thinks that in his armor he’d stand a decent chance of winning the physical fight, the PR disaster for him as a wannabe hero - especially one that hadn’t signed the Accords - would spell the death of any hero career he might have imagined.

And that’s when it hits him: when is it acceptable to fight Iron Man? If, and only if, Iron Man is the bad guy in the scenario. It would take some doing, and it’s certainly not plan A. Hell, it’s not even plan F. But in this moment, Quentin Beck is sure of one thing.

Tony Stark should think twice before taunting an artist whose chosen medium is reality itself.

-

Tony isn’t sure if Beck is stupid or just a cocky son of a bitch, but he’d have to be one or the other to be sitting in a Starbucks not two blocks from Stark Tower, calmly sipping some sort of iced tea drink while maintaining steady eye contact with the security camera behind the counter.

The alert had come in a little after noon, after the one that confirmed that the man had spent the night in California. And after the series of alerts displaying his texted conversation with Peter the night before.

_ We need to talk _ . Tony had laughed at the initial text that Peter had sent - he’s making a discussion about someone’s villainous origin story sound like a potential breakup, but he isn’t laughing at Beck’s earnest reply.

_ The roof, 7 pm? _

Or Peter’s agreement,  _ I’ll be there _ .

Either Beck’s file hadn’t persuaded the kid to stay away from him, or Peter is about to do something very dangerous and try and take Beck on alone tonight. Either way, Tony knows he needs to try and nip this in the bud.

So, sunglasses and a hat later, Tony is entering a Starbucks and sitting across from one of his least favorite people in the world. Well, one of his current least favorite people, at least.

He’s barely sat down before Beck says to him, “Order something.”

“Excuse me?”

“Order something.” He nods towards the counter. “It’s only polite, if we’re going to be chatting here for a bit.”

“I can think of a dozen places I’d rather have this conversation from,” Tony mutters, making no move to stand, and Quentin rolls his eyes. 

“Dramatic, as usual. I’m sure you’d rather be discussing this across a set of bars, or a glass wall with holes in it, but here we are. Be civil.”

“Got it in one,” Tony snipes back, leaning over slightly. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing here. Making yourself look all,” he gestured vaguely towards Quentin, with his disheveled clothes and unshaven face, “so if I try to take you in I look bad, right?”

“Actually,” Quentin responds calmly, still sipping his tea, “I thought that by meeting in a public place it would discourage any funny business. From either of us. The mango green tea is really quite nice,” he says, taking a long drink and not breaking eye contact until Tony finally sighs, stands, and comes back with a triple shot of espresso.

Before Tony can say anything, Quentin holds up a hand. “You think I have the potential to become a villain. I’m sure you’re here to threaten me to stay away from Peter, to fade back into obscurity, but I’m not a threat to you. Not in the way you’re thinking, anyway. As much as I’d love to see you fall from your ivory tower, I’m not going to be the one to push you. So leave me alone. Let me watch Peter’s back - you’ve shown that you’re certainly not going to be the one to do it.”

He leans back in his chair after that, taking another long sip of his tea. “That it?” Tony asks, unimpressed, and Quentin shrugs.

“Not nearly, but I’m willing to hear your ‘I’m the hero here so piss off’ monologue so I know how much I have to threaten you to get you to leave me alone.” He places his drink back on the table and folds his arms over his chest. “Come on, I’m sure you were rehearsing exactly what buttons to push to get me to back down. Go for it.  _ Warn me _ .”

This is… not how Tony was expecting this conversation to go. Quentin is staring at him with icy blue eyes, waiting for him to blink, and Tony knows he needs to put a stop to this right  _ fucking _ now. “Stop pretending to be a hero in your stolen armor and fake magic. I don’t know what your endgame is, but I’m not stupid enough to think that you, the person who suggested I stole me suit tech from someone, is altruistic enough to want nothing out of this but to watch Spider-Man’s back and take down a few common thugs. So what do you want? Become an Avenger and then betray us, break us up even more? Because you’re a little late on that. Are you using Peter to hurt me? Because I don’t doubt that he can take you out if you try to betray him. So here’s my offer. Turn away now. Stop whatever you’re doing and I’ll make sure you get a cushy job somewhere. Hammer Industries, maybe, your talent level would be perfectly at home there.” 

Quentin hasn’t blinked this entire time, staring at Tony with a hint of a smirk on his face, and it’s unnerving. Tony doesn’t let it get to him, however, and continues, “If you don’t back off, mark my words. I will make sure you are sent to the Raft and never see daylight again. They’ve contained bigger threats than you there, after all. If they can handle Wanda Maximoff they can handle you.”

He finally blinks, raising an eyebrow. “As far as threatening monologues go, not bad. Four out of five stars.” Quentin shrugs slightly, breaking eye contact just long enough to glance at the door.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Tony responds dryly, “You taking the deal?”

“I took a star off for the mediocre carrot, the even more mediocre stick, and the fact that at this point I think you’re intentionally misunderstanding what I’m going for here,” Quentin says, not responding to Tony’s question yet, “So let me tell you what’s going to happen here. I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. You’re going to back off. Peter gets someone to watch his back, I get to make a difference, and you get to stave off my inevitable slide into villainy.” He leans in, his smile all teeth. “Sound like a deal?”

“You’re not taking this seriously,” Tony starts to say, but Quentin cuts him off. 

“I know this is the point where I’m supposed to say ‘I like you, but’ or at least ‘I respect you, but’ but the thing is, neither of those are true. And the one thing I don’t like to do is lie. So here’s a statement of fact, Anthony Stark. Leave me alone. If I fall, you fall with me.” Quentin snaps at him, all pretense of civility vanished like morning mist.

“Is that a threat, Mister Beck?” Tony says, tone like ice, “What are you going to do? You fight me, you become the villain you are putting so much effort into protesting you are not.”

“I’m not going to fight you,” Quentin says, taking another long sip of his tea. “I know the most powerful thing about you isn’t your suit, or your company, it’s your image. And,” he reaches up and taps something behind his ear, and suddenly Tony is staring across the table at his own face, normally warm brown eyes containing malice he has never seen in the mirror. “I’m a projectionist, Mister Stark. If there’s one thing I understand, it’s how important a person’s image can be.”

“Where did you get  _ that _ ?” Tony hisses, eyes darting around to see if anyone has noticed his double.

“Amazing little device, isn’t it?” Quentin chuckles as he deactivates it. “SHIELD should really be more careful about where they store their tech. I almost forgot that I’d grabbed it, to be honest. But I think my point is made, Stark. I’m pretty close to rock bottom. I have so little to lose. So  _ don’t _ screw with me. I said I wouldn’t push you out of your ivory tower, but I promise I  _ will _ pull you down with me if you throw me out.”

“You’re insane,” Tony snarls, but Quentin knows his point has been made, and relaxes back into his chair, shrugging.

“I think the exact wording you used on my dismissal papers was ‘unstable,’ if I remember correctly.” He smirks slightly, waving a hand dismissively. “If nothing else, trust that I am deadly serious about this. You leave me alone and I could become your greatest ally. But push me? You might just find you’re making a mistake. And a very strong enemy.”

Tony narrows his eyes. “One month.”

“Hm?”

“I’ll back off for one month. You prove that you’re trustworthy during that month, and I’ll leave you alone for good. Heck, I’ll even make you part of the team. But I swear to god,” Tony says, leaning over the table, voice ice cold. “If Peter gets hurt working with you, or worse, if you hurt him, I will throw you in the deepest, darkest hole I can find, and you will never see the light of day again.”

Quentin doesn’t flinch, half-smile still on his face as he extends his hand across the table. “Sounds more than fair.”

They shake, both gripping a little too hard and wondering exactly what kind of devil they just made a deal with. Quentin gives Tony a sarcastic salute as he stands, takes the dregs of his drink, and strolls out of the shop. Tony can only wonder if he’s managed to stave off disaster or brought it closer to bare.

-

Quentin gets about a block and half before he ducks into an alleyway, doubled over and desperately trying to suck air in through a seizing chest. He’s trembling, shaking, barely able to stand on wobbly legs as he leans against the wall and tries to get this adrenaline letdown under control. 

He’s alive. He’s alive and not in prison and Tony Stark agreed to back off - for a little while, at least. Now the only problem is finding a new workshop and - 

Peter. He pulls out his phone, checks it again. There’s been no further communication from the kid since his confirmation that he’d be on the roof tonight, and Quentin isn’t sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Hopefully all it means is that the kid is in school where he belongs, doing normal teenager stuff instead of trying to be a hero.

Or it could mean that he’s only meeting with Quentin tonight to try to bring him in, or to tell him he never wants to see him again. Which Quentin probably wouldn’t honor, because he knows the type of villains that Spider-Man has gotten himself involved with and he’s not letting the kid brave that alone.

He slowly straightens up, breathing in and out until he’s confident that he can open a portal to his things in Maine and figure out his next plan of action without falling over.  _ Maybe _ , he thinks,  _ fate has decided to cut him a break this time _ .

He’s not counting on it. Hope for the best but plan for the worst, and you’ll never be caught unprepared.

-

Meanwhile, in a warehouse in the suburbs.

The second Phineas Mason, affectionately known as the Tinker to his friends, sees the news report of the botched ATM robbery; he knows that he’s in trouble. They’re all in trouble, really. The whole crew, the whole operation. Selling to small time crooks may have been a good way to build capital when business was slow, but…

The warehouse door bursts open, slams into the wall, and Mason can hear any murmurs of conversation stop as everyone tries to look busy.

“Who sold that anti-grav projector?” His voice is quiet, almost conversational. “Come on, I can check the ledgers. How many of those did you make, Phineas?”

Mason flinched. “Just the one. I haven’t finished the second yet.”

“Just the one, huh?” Toomes tosses a newspaper onto Mason’s desk. “Any other anti-grav projects I should know about?”

It’s the mid-day edition of the Daily Bugle, cover page headlined with  _ Mysterio - Miracle or Menace? _ followed with two images - a grainy surveillance camera photo of the new vigilante floating in midair in front of the bank, and an artist’s rendering of the hero in color, red and greens ang golds and a very familiar blue-purple glow around the boots.

“He managed to fix the control system stabilization for human flight,” Mason says, astonished, hurriedly adding onto that before Toomes got the wrong idea, “Don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed. But he didn’t get that tech from us.”

Toomes doesn’t look convinced. “Then where’d he get it from?”

“Could also be stealing from Stark. Or salvaged it himself, but I’d guess the first,” Mason suggests, looking at the image of this “Mysterio” a little closer. “That’s a Stark Tech helmet, I remember seeing it in that one shipment you hit after the Accords. I told you not to take it because of the tracker, remember?”

“So he’s working with Stark, then?” Toomes’ eyes narrow, but Mason shakes his head.

“I don’t think so.” He takes a closer look at the paper. “That looks like Chitauri metal in the breastplate. You can see the places where whoever made this made mistakes, too. And most of the undersuit, that’s all commercially available stuff. I don’t know if this guy made it himself or went to someone else, but I can tell you it wasn’t Stark. Probably.”

“Hm.” Toomes seems satisfied by that answer at least. “You think Potter made it?”

Now, that was a question Mason was confident in answering. “I doubt it,” he gestures again to the metal chestplate, “he works in unobtrusive protection. Whoever made this is trying to make a splash.”

Toomes turns away, interrogation apparently over, and brandishes the paper at the rest of the crew in the warehouse who are too late in turning away to try to look busy after watching the conversation. “Do you know what this is?” he asks, shaking the paper, then continues without waiting for a response. “This is evidence that we exist. This is publicity. We’ve survived for as long as we have because no one other than our clients knew about us. But this, this  _ Mysterio _ fellow means that we have competition, and since those idiots picked a fight with Spider-Man you can bet we’re on Iron Man’s radar now.”

The room is dead silent. No one wants to be Toomes’ next target. He waits, meeting the eyes of everyone in the room. “Bryce!”

The man stands a little straighter from his position near the van used to transport product. “Yeah, boss?”

“I’m coming with you on the sale tonight, provide support. If we’re lucky…” Toomes trails off, tossing the newspaper back onto the workbench near Mason, “Our new friend will make an appearance, and we can have… A chat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, so it's been a while, huh? Sorry about that. I can make no promises regarding an update schedule, but I am trying. There will be more. It isn't abandoned. 
> 
> But sorry.


	8. astra inclinate, sed non obligant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "_Astra inclinate, sed non obligant_"
> 
> “The stars incline us, but do not bind us.” Peter goes to a party, Toomes makes a flyby, and Quentin and Strange talk about fate. 
> 
> Bit of a weird one, bit of a short one. Action is on the horizon, my friends. It's about to get good.

Peter meets Ned at their usual stop. They walk in silence for a block or two until they pass Delmar’s, and Ned can’t bear to stay quiet any longer.

“So, you were  _ here _ last night,” he says in disbelief, looking back and forth between the caution tape up around the bank and the shattered window of Delmar’s. “Dude, that is super cool. And also,” he adds, after Peter gives him a sharp look, “like, incredibly terrifying.”

“Yeah, if Quentin hadn’t come along I don’t know how it would have gone down.” Peter replies, not even noticing that Ned has stopped short a few paces behind him.

“You know Mysterio  _ too _ ?” Ned asks after a moment, briefly jogging to catch back up, and Peter frowns.

“Who?”

“Do you read the news? Everyone’s talking about New York’s newest vigilante who saved Spider-Man’s life on his first night out.” Ned pulls his phone out of his pocket and passes it to Peter, twitter open. “He’s trending on twitter and everything.”

Peter takes the phone and scrolls through the feed. It’s incredible, the sudden interest in the new hero is even more intense than the first time he’s gone out on patrol as Spider-Man. To be fair, a new and unregistered vigilante in the post-Accords world would certainly get attention, but not this fast. “How’d the news get out?” he asks, giving Ned back his phone.

“Some site called the Daily Bugle picked up the story, and once it started gaining traction the major news outlets started running with it,” Ned is animated, gesturing wildly as they step up onto the platform to wait for their train into Midtown. “A new superhero after the Accords is a big deal, right? And no one knows who he is or where he came from, so that’s just increasing the hype. But you called him Quentin?”

“Keep your voice down,” Peter mutters, glancing at the handful of other people waiting for the train. “I met him a few weeks ago, stopped him from falling off the roof of a building next to Delmar’s. We kept chatting over the past few weeks, and…” he trails off, unsure of where to go from there. After the events of last night he doesn’t know where he and Quentin stand anymore, and all this publicity surrounding his heroic alter ego makes Peter nervous.

On the one hand, it means that Tony will hopefully be more likely to leave Quentin alone, considering the PR backlash that would come from another fight between heroes. On the other hand… He isn’t sure how well Quentin would cope with fame. His file would certainly suggest…

“And?” Ned prompts, cutting off Peter’s line of thought.

“And I dunno,” Peter shrugs. “Apparently he has a history with Mister Stark and the two of them don’t like each other very much.” Oh, that’s a major understatement, but Ned doesn’t need to know about everything that happened last night. Luckily, he seems willing to take that explanation at face value, and they pass the rest of the train ride in relative silence.

And then the questions start up again. “So… Why was Tony Stark at your house last night?”

“I told you, he and Quentin have a ‘history’” Peter responds as they pass through the front doors of the school, air quotes almost palpable around the last word. “He wanted to make sure I was ok.”

“Wait, hold on,” Ned starts to say, processing what exactly that means, but Peter cuts him off with a sharp shake of his head.

“Look, the whole Mysterio thing is kind of up in the air right now, ok? I’ll answer any questions you want about Spider-Man, but not about that, deal?” Peter holds out his hand, and Ned shrugs before going into their secret handshake.

The rest of the day goes about as you would expect, with Ned whispering in Peter’s ear every few minutes with a new question, and then it’s time for gym.

Of course Ned, predictable as always, blurts out that Peter knows Spider-Man. No one believes him, of course, but it does get the two of them an invitation to a party that night.

And really, if ever a missed appointment could be forgiven, a missed appointment in favor of trying to impress your crush is understandable. So whether it was a little convenient that Peter forgot he had a rooftop rendezvous scheduled that night or not, the thought of a party simply replaced his current worries with new ones.

-

It doesn’t take long for Quentin to find a suitably remote storage locker to move his things to after the truce is agreed upon. It’s further away, this time in Idaho, and he’s able to salvage most of the things he left behind in Ohio. After checking to make sure that Stark didn’t leave behind any trackers, of course.

And then, for the first time in almost a week, he goes back to the Sanctum with the intention of trying to return to some sort of normalcy, of returning to something like the normal schedule he had worked out with Strange.

He’s expecting a lecture, or at the very least an acknowledgement that he skipped almost a week of training sessions, but Strange is nowhere to be found. Something’s wrong, Quentin can feel it as he quickly runs upstairs to change back into his vestments before properly searching the Sanctum for Strange. 

He finds him in a small study, tucked away on the second floor down a hallway that Quentin didn’t even know existed before now. He’s sitting cross-legged, floating a few inches above the ground, wreathed in green light and twitching and moving like a bad movie special effect meant to convey someone moving at super speed.

The necklace that always hangs around his neck is open, Quentin realizes, the green light originates from there before making up the mandalas of the spell Strange is weaving before floating off into the air like mist. Quentin take a hesitant step into the room, unsure of whether he should disturb Strange in the middle of a spell before he decides to take a chance and hesitantly reaches out a hand. He’s not even trying to touch Strange, just to investigate the new form of magic surrounding him.

The second Quentin’s fingers touch the green mist, it’s like he’s wrenched off his feet, disorientation nearly causing him to topple over before he finds his equilibrium again. He’s not standing in Strange’s study anymore, instead on a strange glass walkway overlooking - well, he’s not sure, to be perfectly honest. There’s mist and smoke surrounding the walkway, small flying objects zipping around from place to place.

He spares a glance down at himself. He’s wearing some sort of grey and black outfit, a pistol strapped to his leg, and he can feel the bulk of some sort of bullet-proof vest covering his torso and an antennae and some sort of electronic equipment strapped to his back.

_ What the hell? _ he thinks, before looking down the walkway to see Spider-Man (but not Spider-Man, the movements are right but the costume isn’t, the webspinner’s blue replaced with black, melted and slashed to reveal skin beneath) making his way down the hall, fighting his way through a cluster of drones (ah, that’s what those flying things out the window are) towards Quentin.

He’s about to call out to Spider-Man, to ask what’s going on, before everything goes to shit. Spider-Man hits a drone just enough to send it careening, a hail of bullets spraying out of forward mounted guns and catching Quentin in the chest and gut, piercing through the vest like it wasn’t even there.

The pain is excruciating, worse even than the blast he took last night, and he collapses to the ground, clutching his wounds as his lifeblood gushes out onto the walkway floor.

His mouth tastes like salt and copper and he thinks that maybe this wouldn’t hurt so much if he knew what the  _ hell _ was going on. Is this how he dies? He squeezes his eyes shut as he curls tighter in on himself, barely noticing a hand on his shoulder until the pain recedes, returning to the dull ache he had been dealing with all morning. His chest feels bruised as he experimentally relaxes slightly, but it’s blunt force trauma, not a million tiny shards of death burrowing into his core.

One eye opens. He’s back in Strange’s study, curled on the floor, the man himself standing over him with one hand on his shoulder and an expression of genuine concern on his face.

“What…” Quentin rasps, carefully levering himself to be sitting upright rather than laying in the fetal position, “What the hell was that?”

“None of your concern,” Strange replies, neutral expression replacing concern as soon as he withdraws his hand from Quentin’s shoulder and turns away, beginning to make his way past Quentin and in the direction of the training room. “You’re late to begin training for the day, but we can make up the time later.”

“Hold on, now,” Quentin interjects as he stands, pausing slightly as the sudden change in position leaves him dizzy. He hurries after Strange, one arm still wrapped around his ribs, “like hell that’s not my concern. I was sure I was going to  _ die _ there. I felt the bullets. Everything seemed so real. What  _ was _ that?”

Strange stops short and turns to face him, cloak flaring out dramatically, and Quentin nearly trips over himself to stop before he collides with Strange. “I know what you’ve been up to. I allowed it at first when talking to Spider-Man was all you were doing, but you’ve gone too far. This absurd hero business needs to stop.”

Quentin’s weak protest is silenced when Strange pulls a newspaper out of the folds of his vestments, gesturing to the headlines. Mysterio. Huh, cool name. Quentin would be a lot more pleased about all of this if it wasn’t the inevitable preamble to being kicked out. “That doesn’t answer my question,” he says instead, looking down at his feet as he avoids looking at both the newspaper and at Strange.

Strange changes the subject again. “If it was the fate of the world in the balance, could you let Peter Parker die?”

“What the hell kind of question is that,” Quentin asks, not even really stopping to question the fact that Strange knows as much, if not more, about Spider-Man’s secret identity as he does.

“Answer it.”

“He’s a kid!” Quentin protests, “If it’s the fate of the world or a teenager’s life, things are already all kinds of fucked up.”

Strange shakes his head, disappointed. “A Sorcerer must stay objective, must not-”

“Yeah, yeah, must not value one life above others.” Quentin rolls his eyes. “So I’m not much of a Sorcerer. I still don’t see what that has to do with that vision, or whatever the hell that was.”

The silence between the two stretches out for what seems like a small eternity to Quentin, and he half expects Strange to simply tell him to leave. It catches him off guard when Strange finally replies, “The future. Or one possible future of you with no objectivity, where you prize your own life and hurt feelings above all else. It’s a path you’ve only barely begun to stray from, a path you could fall back onto as easily as breathing.”

“Wait, that’s how you know what I’ve been up to? You’ve been spying on me with  _ that _ ?” Quentin gestures as the now-closed amulet. “What the hell, man? Don’t you have better things to do? Why did you think that was necessary, or even close to the realm of ok?” I’ve already made a lot of compromises today, I really didn’t want to have to deal with this with you right now.”

“I checked into you when you first arrived,” Strange says, voice level like his answer is the most obvious thing in the world. “I wanted to know what kind of person I was taking in. And I saw someone with incredible capacity for both good and evil, whose path through time would be difficult and for whom I wouldn’t always be there. Quentin, I’m trying to teach you, to train you, so you’re ready for the dark days ahead.”

“Oh  _ come on _ ,” Quentin rolls his eyes, hands up, and turns away for a moment before looking back, finger raised to point at himself. “I am  _ not _ a bad person. Everyone seems so convinced that I’m going to snap at any minute, like I’m intrinsically dangerous. They’re wrong.”

“Are they?” Strange’s voice is quiet, pensive, but his disbelief is clear. 

“ _ Yes _ !” Quentin is well and truly exasperated now. “Honestly, I don’t think anyone is intrinsically dangerous. My education and your training have made me what I am, but that doesn’t make me a threat, at least not to the people who seem to be worried about it. And I know you think that attachments aren’t a good thing, but I think they’re important. If you get too caught up in the big picture, you forget about all the pieces that make it up.”

“That’s the issue,” sighing, Strange shakes his head. “The big picture still exists when a piece or two is missing. You can’t get hung up on individuals.”

“Or else I’ll end up dying on a walkway somewhere?” The silence after Quentin’s comment stretches on long enough to wonder if Strange is going to answer at all, whether he finally crossed the line they’d been dancing around this whole conversation. He begins to turn, to go back to his room and pack to leave before Strange finally answers.

“You’re really serious about this hero business, aren’t you?” he asks, sighing again. “If you miss another practice without letting me know, I will kick you out. But if you’re going to be cavorting out there in nothing but spandex I should at least make sure that you’re not going to get yourself or someone else killed.” Strange turns away himself then, pushing past Quentin back into the hall and leaving him to process what he’d said.

“Wait, so just like that you’re ok with the whole,” he pauses, gesturing to the newspaper stuck in Strange’s belt, “Mysterio business? You’re going to keep training me?”

“If I tried to stop you I’d lose you anyway,” Strange replies without looking back. “Maybe your fate isn’t set in stone just yet.”

-

So Strange can see the future and scry on people. Somehow, that answers questions that Quentin didn’t even realise he has, like how he could afford this house, utilities, food… The guy probably uses whatever the hell was in that necklace to play the stock markets. After all, the hero gig doesn’t exactly pay much unless you were on Tony Stark’s payroll.

Somehow he doubts that Stark even knows that Sorcerers exist, beyond himself and maybe Strange, considering that he and Victoria had tracked down the man fairly easily when this all began. 

His chest aches as he runs his fingers over his sternum, the taste of blood still present in his mouth after he brushed his teeth no less than four times. It just doesn’t make sense, he thinks to himself, staring up at the ceiling of his room in the Sanctum. Nothing in that vision makes sense, not to him as he stands today.

Not so long ago, desperate and angry and powerless on his own, he could see himself someday ending up in that grey-and-black mo-cap suit. It’s a stretch, sure. The execution seems sloppy, to be caught out in the open in clothing he would only wear if he were trying to stay hidden. And the drones - where had they come from? Their sheer numbers seemed like something more in line with what Stark would have at his disposal than anything Quentin could ever get his hands on.

And to die at the hands of Peter. Peter, a kid who certainly had no business getting himself involved in something so incredibly dangerous. Where were the rest of the Avengers in that nightmare future? 

He doesn’t think Strange is lying to him. The man had never struck Quentin as someone who would lie unless he deemed it absolutely necessary. If the vision was fabricated to get Quentin to stop trying to be a hero, wouldn’t Strange have tried harder to convince him to stop?

He has a headache, although the differentiation between a headache caused by his bizarre circumstances and everything he put his body through the night before is quickly becoming moot. He checks his watch. It’s barely four in the afternoon, although the blackout curtains pulled over his window make the interior of his room as dark as it would be in the middle of the night. The only illumination leaks into the room in the form of light from the hallway under the door and the reds and greens of various indicator LED’s on electronics quietly humming from his desk.

It’s enough to find the bottle of pain meds he keeps on his desk and shake a pair of tablets into his hand and swallow them dry before laying back down, hoping against hope that he can get a little bit more sleep before he needs to meet back up with Peter.

-

He’s back on that walkway. Somehow through the logic of the dream, or vision, or whatever the hell this is, Quentin isn’t confused, or worried, or even panicked like he was the first time. He’s angry, almost nonsensically so, yet detached enough from the dream to somehow know that it’s not him that’s angry, it’s the dream him.

It is some small comfort, to feel this impossibly deep rage, anger beyond anything he ever thought he would be capable of, and yet be detached, an observer in his own skin as he paces back and forth on this bridge. 

Then he’s being sprayed with bullets in that impossible leap of dream logic that only makes sense while you’re dreaming. And it hurts, oh, how it hurts. Spider-Man is standing over him, red and black suit standing starkly against the green mist that is beginning to close in around the two of them.

Spider-Man kneels down, one hand gently touching Quentin’s shoulder as he lays curled up on the ground, before he pulls off his mask.

“I did warn you,” Tony Stark says, and Quentin can’t even muster enough energy to be surprised. The man stands up, one foot nudging into Quentin’s side with enough force that his vision whites out for a moment in pain. 

He’s still curled up, but now on the cot in his storage locker as Iron Man holds up a repulsor at him, the emitter glowing yellow as it prepares to fire. “Really, Beck. You, a hero? It would be better for the world, for Peter Parker, and for you if I just put you out of your misery now.”

Quentin coughs roughly, the taste of copper in his mouth as he manages to move one arm enough to wipe the blood off his lip. “Why are you doing this?” he rasps, flinching back as Stark strides forward -

\- and Strange is now standing over him as Quentin kneels on the floor of the Sanctum entryway, bound tightly in a spider’s web of golden strands that keep him from moving more than a millimeter in any direction. 

The Sorcerer Supreme doesn’t speak, just looks sadly at Quentin, eyes distant, almost like the man is seeing someone else before he makes a golden sword with a precise hand motion and places the tip on Quentin’s chest, just above his heart. Quentin can see just enough out of the corner of his eye to know he’s still wearing the strange armor from the first vision, bullet holes still in place but now seeping viscous golden liquid, bleeding magic like life’s blood itself.

He manages to force out one word through his magical gag, just one.

“Why?”

Strange opens his mouth, but it isn’t words that comes out, it’s bells. Electronic sounding, frantic bells, and

-

Quentin’s eyes fly open as he flails for his phone, knocking it off his bedside table and onto the floor. He swears under his breath as leans over the side of the bed, fingers scrabbling against the carpeted floor until he finds it and stabs the off button. He’s breathing heavily, adrenaline coursing through his veins. He’s sore, of course, his shoulder now throbbing in time with his heartbeat after the sudden and unexpected motion.

Collapsing back into bed, he checks the time. Six-thirty. Barely enough time to make it to his storage locker to change and make it to the roof on time, but he’s not missing this appointment. 

By the time he manages to get to his feet, the confusion of the dream has all but faded, leaving instead a vague, unsettled feeling. Quentin isn’t one to believe in premonitions, but somehow he knows deep in the back of his mind that something is going to go wrong tonight. He just hopes no one is going to get hurt as a result of it.


End file.
